Well, CFEngine (especially 3.x, a third rewrite of the same basic idea) does not show these trade-offs. It was designed from the ground up as a general tool based on previous experiences with wide deployments, it (its codebase) did not start as a script for solving some specific problem in some specific workflow.

Puppet has similar history, I believe, as a tool that was written to replace cfengine (2.x) without its shortcomings.