You're not wrong. But in my case, that had been basically forbidden as an option, essentially because it "wasn't supported by Amazon," and because there's just

You're not wrong. But in my case, that had been basically forbidden as an option, essentially because it "wasn't supported by Amazon," and because there's just additional risk to non-standard approaches. AWS certifications cover CloudFormation, so you can hire for that with low risk pretty easily. Other nonstandard utilities, not so much.