I would agree (if I understand the metaphor within a metaphor, that is) that documentation and best practices are probably the biggest weakness in the Chef comm

I would agree (if I understand the metaphor within a metaphor, that is) that documentation and best practices are probably the biggest weakness in the Chef community. Once you add in tools like berkshelf or librarian-chef where the tool creators recommend totally different workflows from those recommended by Opscode, not to mention the wide variety of testing stories... it's a mess. I've heard from someone at Opscode that fixing that mess is one of their priorities, but until then, it's definitely a problem. Where we really need to be is a place where configuration management is just another part of application repositories (there's a parallel here to db migrations), so that web applications are completely self-contained. That includes versioning, unit testing, etc. I haven't yet seen any of the configuration management tools come forward with a solid unified best practice solution for treating applications this way, but there are a lot of people working in that direction, which makes me very hopeful for the near future.