You've perfectly captured the vision: "elevated... sane user experience and engineering driven principles" is exactly what we're building the Configuration Control Plane to provide, building on the capabilities of open source CUE.

We completely agree that "YAML and friends will stay." That's a core design principle of CUE: its ability to easily consume existing formats and export back to them, so upstream and downstream tools and workflows don't need to change.

Thanks again for the great comment!