I've tried pelican, lektor, hugo, and even a cobbled-together flask-based (using frozen pages module) custom static site builder. One of the biggest challenges/time sinks/annoyances of adopting any of these types of platforms is the time spent on the initial wiring up of the templates. Maybe I'm lazy in this regard, but I'd rather use a GUI/WYSIWYG interface to do the initial UX (not talking about design here, only placement of site objects/elements) for the site within the context of the relevant template. I don't mind spending a few minutes on setting up the build environment, setting up any dependencies, because its a local app that's being installed, so I get it that it requires a tiny investment in time. But setting up the templates, boy, that annoys me; especially for small sites which only have few pages and infrequent additions.
Case in point: I really wanted to use lektor; it's elegant persistent storage mechanism (no database required, basically text files organized within folders), and its brilliant idea for use of a local web GUI were what attracted me to it in the first place. But setup - for example - was annoying as hell on Windows (hey some of us can't afford to keep buying Macs!), and then of course after the install/setup comes the wiring of the templates (ugh). I can not imagine a conventional (non-dev.) user - who I would guess is a good candidate to extract great benefit from using a web GUI - won't have the patience or inclination to dive into code to wire up the templates. I don't mean to pick on lektor (I highly respect the team behind this!!), but it is an example of what most of these static site generators do: they mean to simplify things but 1 or 2 aspects of the system seem like quite a time sink.
Case in point: I really wanted to use lektor; it's elegant persistent storage mechanism (no database required, basically text files organized within folders), and its brilliant idea for use of a local web GUI were what attracted me to it in the first place. But setup - for example - was annoying as hell on Windows (hey some of us can't afford to keep buying Macs!), and then of course after the install/setup comes the wiring of the templates (ugh). I can not imagine a conventional (non-dev.) user - who I would guess is a good candidate to extract great benefit from using a web GUI - won't have the patience or inclination to dive into code to wire up the templates. I don't mean to pick on lektor (I highly respect the team behind this!!), but it is an example of what most of these static site generators do: they mean to simplify things but 1 or 2 aspects of the system seem like quite a time sink.