How can CiviCRM manage and deploy configuration?
CiviCRM Features looked like it had promise:
https://www.drupal.org/project/features_civicrm

I spoke to the former maintainer, Tim Mallezie, about this a while ago. He was very helpful. The module was proving hard to maintain, as each entity in CiviCRM required it's own handler (perhaps this is something CiviCRM Entity could help with); and the overhead was proving too much to be worth continuing development.

At the time Tim noted that:


  ...we now use the CiviCRM API in custom modules with update hooks to deploy CiviCRM configuration.