Over the years, I've also used cfengine and a host of other systems and have decided that simplicity and the ability to customize a system to fit your needs are key. Turns out it's quite easy to roll your own, given the right tools. I now use:

gsl https://github.com/imatix/gsl and synctool https://github.com/walterdejong/synctool

The former is used to generate configurations for various classes of systems and the latter pushes them out over ssh. Works very well.