Puppet definitely has its own pains, but I feel like I'd quickly reach a block trying to use this tool, and end up either writing more outside of Slaughter than in it or just forking it outright. I think these are the killer Puppet features for me:
* Ability to define resources and their dependencies declaratively
* Facter and its API, the ability to add custom facts that get deployed with my modules
* TLS encryption and certificate management for client communications
* Reporting/metrics for each run
* Exported resources
I agree entirely, as the author one of the goals was to be "serverless". That means there is no handling for TLS/certs - it is delegated to the transports.
(So you can get security by using SSL-protected git repository which allows the SSL to prevent MITM attacks, and git itself to avoid corruption.)
The metrics and exported things are almost certainly never going to get done, but having custom facts on a per-host basis is something that is minimally available right now, and will probably be expanded in the future.
The declarative notion is interesting but down that path lies madness - as an implementor - I don't want to go down the DSL route which makes procedural style definitions the simplest option.
