OTOH our infrastructure isn't THAT huge and with template jails and configs that reside in git repos anyways, doing it manual won't take that long to justify the overhead and extra time I often had to spend to get/keep this working. Especially because a lot of FreeBSD/Jail/smartOS/zones-related modules had inconsistencies, quirks, bugs or were simply broken and more than once a simple "just add this small thing to the playbook" ended in hour-long bugfixing sessions or even complete rewrites of modules (usually in shell or perl because I absolutely hate Python...)
Plus with basejails and zfs snapshots backups are extremely cheap and simple and just as fast to restore, so my motivation to keep/get this working dwindled more and more...