Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the point of managing state at all. If it's stateful you're doing it wrong, and likely deploying it wrong too. And if that's the case I don't see the point of a level of indirection outside the shell script. But that might be just me :) I talk a bit more about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY but it's quite heavily edited and a little out of date.
This comment is disturbing because it assumes there is a wrong way to do things. In fact, the point of managing state is to react to the changing state of different resources (ie. services in a service-oriented architecture, the physical or virtual systems they run on, the networks that connect them, etc.) and to automatically resolve failures through known and tested state-migrations. If you missed that, you're in n…
They should be part of the definition of your system (ie the state), not changed on the fly.
If I said ShutIt was elegant, I was wrong (not sure where I did). It's not elegant, just as the real world is not.
Anyone trying to make config management look elegant is selling you a pup.