I know I'm in a minority, but I really dislike YAML... I recently did a lot of Ansible and boy, at the beginning, I was just struggling a lot. Syntactic whitespace kills me.
I don't like it in Python either, but for some reason, when I write Python, it's a lot easier. Maybe YAML is just a bit more complex (and Python has better IDE support..?)
I know you only said Python is better, not great, but you might want to check out OpsMop: https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/opsmop-building-the-next-g... . By the creator of Ansible, in pure Python, including the config.
Is there a reason http://opsmop.io/ and http://vespene.io/ are both down and their Github's both say "DISCONTINUED"?