great, thanks! i had misinterpreted that part of the issue thread as being discussion on potential syntax, not on actual working syntax. with that, it worked smoothly. i see now that this is even documented in the sphinx manual, it just didn’t show up in search when i tried earlier… 
i guess it’s not mentioned more prominently because of not being considered the preferred method at this stage, but i would imagine quite a few early users would find this useful in context where configuration is managed and locked down via puppet/chef/ansible/etc - hopefully this thread will help 