Oh no disagreement there. I was just disagreeing with the GPs disparagement of jinja2, which is a limitation of how Ansible was implemented and has absolutely nothing to do with jinja2.
Ansible is great stuff, but some of those decisions were quite weird.
Jinja is great as a templating language. I find yaml by itself to be clean and readable. Cram all of it in to the same soup, mix in the global variables, and it quickly turns into a nightmare. It takes what's already a problem in a dynamically typed language and amplifies it.
Ansible is great stuff, but some of those decisions were quite weird.