That's all I'm saying: tenable, but difficult (read: expensive). Frankly, I'm not convinced it is a worthwhile investment. Hence, my interest in how others have approached a similar problem.
Hitch looks pretty nifty, but I'm not sold on the yml/jinja2 approach. I grew to loathe Cucumber, and this approach seems similar. If you can't convince your non-technical staff to write tests in this language (which, in my experience, you can't), then you're better off writing the honest-to-god code that programmers are comfortable with (and can more easily modularize and refactor). YMMV I suppose!