[existencebox]

Mm, I'd say you're right on about some things, but slightly off the mark on others. Traditional windows folks certainly know at least some things about CMS, or rather, CM like functionality. WMI/WDS and friends are surprisingly robust when it comes to things like provisioning and patching, and powershell has been (and I say this as a primarily linux weenie) a breath of fresh air in the windows ecosystem, although I can't speak for its capability specifically as a CM utility. What I'd say is true is that windows folks don't typically know about linux CM, and visa versa. (At least, I certainly didn't know squat about windows CM when I started working in a heterogeneous system).

We made a similar choice as you did, going with salt for certain functionality (because as you found, weird edge cases/fragility of salt on windows) but at the root of things, you use the tool that works well for the system. And in some situations, that means living in a bipartisan world (WDS for windows deployment, spacewalk for linux) or looking for a solution that plays well in the sandbox with both (well), which is a bit rarer, ala salt.

I'm sure there are people who solved this problem way more elegantly, but for being pretty damn understaffed and new to devops when we started, it worked surprisingly well by the end of things :)