I am not ashamed to admit that I felt the same way for a time. I don't know when things changed, but it started to click recently, and I actually like yaml. I guess that it helps that it has become rather ubiquitous in our build tools between cloud-init, puppet hieradata, and ansible roles/playbooks.

What hasn't been helpful is what others here and elsewhere have reminded me time and time again... "JSON is a subset of yaml"