is it possible to set buckets’ retain policy to DESTROY for the initial stack deployment, and then later flip that to RETAIN, and deploy to set that retain policy? (I’m deploying a stack in a fresh account and every time there’s a stack deploy error, I have to manually delete all the buckets before trying again)

Yeah.. Don’t think there’s an out of the box way to do this. This is an annoying problem tho.

no prob, it’s mostly an issue until the stack bugs have been worked out 100%. then it’s smooth sailing 🙂