[Jeff_Brown]

> All I did was add another layer of complexity

If that was in fact all you had done, it would not be worth it. But it might remove a ton of boilerplate from your YAML.

[LoSboccacc]

or, one can eliminate boilerplate in code so that configuration stays simple and the logic in the application

I mean what's the role of configuration? is so that installer can tune or match environments. if configuration becomes as hard as your program to understand then installation won't ever scale