tool to wrangle config file changes

[Rogelio <scubacuda () gmail com>]

Long story short, a really crappy vendor is being shoved down our
NOC's throat.  They have a horrid CLI (if you can call it that).
People don't understand it (it's non-intuitive) and are screwing up
things all the time.

In the hopes of coping with the madness, some of us are looking to put
together some sort of open source configuration management tool, such
as RANCID.  Any luck with this on non-standard equipment, particularly
ones that DO NOT allow you to output something nice and "scriptable"
(e.g. Cisco's "show running-config")

(If not RANCID, any other suggestions?)