[galenmarchetti]

points #3 and #4; "user-friendly helm chart creation" and "values.yaml is an antipattern"...I think we're just all stuck in this horrible middle ground between "need static declarative configurations for simplicity of change management/fewest chances to mess it up" and "need dynamic, sometimes even imperative logic for flexibility, configurability, and ease of development"

several commenters have mentioned Cue/Jsonnet/friends as great alternatives, others find them limiting / prefer pulumi with a general purpose language

our solution at kurtosis is another, and tilt.dev took the same route we did...adopt starlark as a balanced middle-ground between general-purpose languages and static configs. you do get the lovely experience of writing in something pythonic, but without the "oops this k8s deployment is not runnable/reproducible in other clusters because I had non-deterministic evaluation / relied on external, non-portable devices"