A big difference in our environment is that when puppet encounters a failure, it keeps going with everything that doesn't have an explicit dependecy on the fail

A big difference in our environment is that when puppet encounters a failure, it keeps going with everything that doesn't have an explicit dependecy on the failed resource. When ansible encounters a failure, it stops dead (of course, you can override that for specific tasks with "failed_when: false"). If you want the flexibility to choose what to fix next, you want puppet. In my arguably understaffed environment, it's useful to be able to say: "no, we can't do that yet, we must fix this first." Things end up cleaner.