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> but immediately discovered I needed to create a provider

That doesn't make any sense to me, if you're coming from CloudFormation. What for?

Terraform often doesn't cover complex, less commonly used AWS services or features. For example, practically zero coverage of the entire Media Services suite of products.

And for those edge cases, you can use this: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...

Which still gives all the power of HCL to generate the CF stacks. No need to create a new provider.

Migrating a 1500+ line CloudFormation template to Terraform (with some hope that a little extra flexibility would simplify the solution) only to keep using CloudFormation (through a Terraform-shaped hole) for the most complex parts of the problem... would not have been helpful.

Hence my mention of HCL. Between the language and Terraform modules, you're certainly not just "using CloudFormation through a Terraform-shaped hole". You have proper Terraform available to work with the CF template. You can even fully abstract each resource behind a module 1:1 if you wanted to.

In a way, it's similar to how you'd treat C with inline assembly.

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