When I started troposphere there wasn't a resource specification formally defining the various resource and properties for CloudFormation.
The resource spec came out and it's been interesting to see it evolve. For a project like troposphere, it is sorely needed to ensure correctly reflecting the CloudFormation constrects into code (Python for troposphere). This allowed resources and properties to be auto-generated and have better accuracy.
But recently I've seen some odd usage patterns being used with it which I don't believe are correct. Below is some commentary on it.