Thank you for the feedback - there is definitely a risk of lowest common denominator, and some truth that a generalized toolkit won't be as "good" as a domain-s

Thank you for the feedback - there is definitely a risk of lowest common denominator, and some truth that a generalized toolkit won't be as "good" as a domain-specific tool. For openstack specifically there's goose/juju right now. We (rackspace) have had great success with Fog, jclouds, pkgcloud, libcloud, and other multi-cloud toolkits. For openstack / Rackspace cloud we also have php-opencloud, openstack.net and pyrax (which uses the python-XXXX clients from openstack core). It definitely is a fine line to walk; a good abstraction though means that you can use the most common features easily and float through providers, but you have access to the advanced features if you need or want them. Commonly those advanced features (on a provider level) mean a greater level of vendor lock-in which is why they may not make sense to expose in the higher level abstraction.