[Yarnage]

>You can claim all the experience you want, but your statements belie the truth. JSON is in no way limited to raw data interchange,

I never stated such a thing but that is what it's designed for and the primary use-case for JSON. I would imagine most other cases are edge-cases.

>and the files puppet manages cannot be put off to one side in some magical place where root cannot access them.

No one said to push them off to the "side" or into some "magical place". It's really simple: puppet has permissions to the files, your users do not.

A system administrator worth his salt isn't going to be messing with configuration files any which way and if said administrator has ROOT access then they should already know that's the level where puppet works and they could screw something up.

So I'm not really sure what your point was...