I've long held that I'm happy to treat Drush Make and the rest as transition technologies until Drupal moves fully to Composer. If that day isn't strictly here yet, then it's awfully close.
The Composer template for Drupal projects is a quiet game-changer, living up to everything Lullabot has written about it. Well, when it works. It's a bit bleeding-edge, but responses to bug reports are timely and helpful, which suggests that the combined effort of Composer templates and Packagist repositories has come a long way.
Here's how I just moved to the recent 8.0.5 release of Drupal on my development and build:
composer update drupal/core & vendor/bin/drush updb -r `pwd`/web
After checking the changes to composer.lock into version control, then I did the same thing on staging and production by just replacing the update with an install. And --dry-run helped occasionally, to make sure I wasn't about to do something crazy.
I'm so pleased to see Drupal and Composer together like this. It means it's time to officially mothball Drush Instance. It was a great idea at the time—a wrapper for Drush Make to make other filesystem-based changes—but drupal-composer/drupal-project can do anything Drush Instance could do, and more. Onward!
