The trick is that usually what you require is boilerplate until you don't need boilerplate, where the "not boilerplate" parts are hard to predict ahead of time,

The trick is that usually what you require is boilerplate until you don't need boilerplate, where the "not boilerplate" parts are hard to predict ahead of time, and configuration files are pretty bad at this as it's usually difficult to "break out" of the configuration. Very high level frameworks like Rails are probably a better fit for this where you can write simple operations extremely easily, but it's still all just code that can be customized when you need to make small tweaks.