So we should build our most essential tools to suit the lowest common denominator? A proper programming language would allow the people that can only do basic scripting to do that, whilst allowing more advanced users to extend the system further and take full advantage of all the language's features and libraries. When those more basic users got more accustomed to the system, there would be room for them to move up that they wouldn't have if they were stuck with a nasty string-based templating language.
Actually I'd love to be able to drop down to Python in my ansible playbooks/configs but ansible modules are very different to yaml/template files for the effort.
I have some misgivings about Ansible's fundamental design choices. It's main claim to fame seems to be that it sucks less than Puppet and Chef.
I used to really enjoy using Fabric. I only ever tolerated Ansible. I wonder if building on Fabric might have resulted in a better devops tool than Ansible provides.
When you are writing templates for your configuration files, what you've wanted all along was a real programming language.