[wfarr]

You may be interested in checking out Rump: https://github.com/railsmachine/rump

[Disclaimer: I work for Rails Machine.]

It's essentially a headless puppet that centers around a workflow of testing changes from an individual checkout of the puppet code on a target server, testing no-op applies of the manifests, and applying the manifest until you're happy enough to commit, push, and roll-out.

This won't help with your second annoyance, sadly, but it should definitely help with the first in quickly pinpointing these sorts of issues without having a messy commit history.