Just to satisfy my own personal curiosity, does this suggest the Ironic core
team plans to maintain both the CLI and library binding aspects of python-
ironicclient long-term? I know that Nova and Neutron (and possibly more) have
deprecated the former (in favour of OSC) and I think there's an ambition to
deprecate the latter also (in favour of SDK), but obviously that doesn't work
for a project that can exist outside of a full-fledged OpenStack deployment like
Ironic (and Cinder, fwiw) can. I'm curious what the long-term vision for these
projects is wrt standalone configurations.

This is not directly in response to your question, but is orthogonal to it: we believe a piece of this work will include adding an API to Ironic which will allow deployment with a single API call, rather than the progression required today (you have to make multiple patch calls to /v1/node, then make a call to set provision state). This means that many of the ergonomic changes to make deployments easier will apply to any API clients -- including openstacksdk. I specifically mention the CLI, in that case, because it's specifically the use case metalsmith targeted.

--Jay