I've had to read the source of boto since there were some boto exceptions I was seeing in stack traces in the fabric deploy process - and ugh, I found the code to be not very intuitive and the documentation poor. Anyone else run into the same issues with boto?

I've found the documentation (not the codebase itself) to be very hit-or-miss. Some components are very well documented, some not at all. Presumably due to maturity of different parts of the stack and the Boto library, but still frustrating from an end-user perspective.

Boto3 might also be worth a read. https://github.com/boto/boto3

Boto3 was made using a much more principled design approach, while Boto grew organically and frankly got a bit out of control. I love boto3, it makes AWS a joy to use.