RE: variables, I'm a heathen and set `hash_behaviour = merge`. This forces nested dict values to be merged instead of overwritten (lists cannot be merged, unli

RE: variables, I'm a heathen and set `hash_behaviour = merge`. This forces nested dict values to be merged instead of overwritten (lists cannot be merged, unlike Salt...). For whatever reason Ansible encourages users to not use this [1], which makes variable usage far more difficult than it should be IMO and leads to situations like you describe where folks have various top level variables for overrides (ssh:, ssh_local:, ssh_global:, etc to combine values). [1] https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/config.html#default-hash-behaviour https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices...