This was exactly my experience as well. Then I was introduced to Mirantis Fuel which uses Cobbler/Puppet to do bare metal provisioning and remote configuration.
Very cool. I looked at the Fuel stuff as well, but at the time it wasn't quite able to do everything I needed so I ended up rolling my own. The 2.2 update they have coming up soon sounds like it fixes all of the things that were 'wrong' for me though!
