All the best @brian_pond for starting this. Would love to see some code when its ready 
. I hope it does not become another bench.
An analysis of these issues might help to identify this. The easy install script broke last week as the Ansible version was not pinned. Maybe a general pinning of all versions would be a good start to fix that problem. But then we have to add the overhead of regularly updating all dependencies!
Either ways, installation is a hard problem. Maybe a docker-first approach might help!