Yes, when I wrote this some time late last year I vaguely recall that Appium wasn't quite able to fit my need. It looks much nicer now.
I want something even less complex for the developer to set up. I want something that shows almost no brittleness. One way to do that is to use Apple's UIAutomation directly. I also wanted to be able to use Ruby and Cucumber, so I built as simple a bridge as I could.
https://github.com/songkick/rubium-ios
You can use it with Cucumber or Rspec or whatever.