Hey Gavin,
While I am obviously biased I think Ansible helps you not reinvent the wheel. There is already hundreds of modules for networking, including support for Arista (EOS), Cisco (NXOS, IOS-XR, IOS-XE, ASA, ACI, etc), Juniper (EOS), Cumulus Linux and much more. Each networking module has a documentation section with examples of how to use it: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/list_of_network_modules.html.
In addition we are starting to put out LOADS more examples in regards to Cisco networking and comparisons to other tools out there. Check out this Github repo I made on Ansible and NAPALM: https://github.com/network-automation/ansible-napalm-samples.
I also highly recommend joining us on IRC (#ansible-network on freenode), and joining networktocode slack (http://networktocode.herokuapp.com/) where you should join the #ansible channel. I will try to monitor the Cisco forums more frequently to help people like yourself.
Ansible is super EASY and network engineers will love it. Here is a small example!
---
- hosts: cisco
connection: local
tasks:
- nxos_config:
backup: yes
provider: "{{login_info}}"
vars:
login_info:
username: admin
password: Bullf00d
