Thank you.

As for a simpler way, I think suitable scripts for recovery should be shipped with pgpool2 as a first step.

A second step would be integrating pgpool2 functionality into PostgreSQL itself. That way, the whole authentication problem would go away, and you would not need to run a separate program. Also, the WAL shipping could be replaced by just letting the non-primary nodes use a replication connection to the primary node directly.

That would not get rid of all of the complexity, but it’d hide a lot more of it from the user :).

Yep use the built in postgres replication and something like wal-e (from heroku origionally) and then manage the failover with a trigger file.