[x3n0ph3n3]

The problem of generating your own YAML is you end up having to maintain multiple copies of nearly identical templates and keeping them in S3. I have done a bit of that and maintaining those as build-time assets rather than run-time assets is less appealing. Granted, that's required whenever you get into the realm of dynamically-determined sets of parameters.

[throwaway894345]

Yes, this is another problem with cloudformation, although IIRC I just used “aws cloudformation deploy” and let it manage my s3 resources.