Hugo is way too complex for me as well. Not to mention the awful awful Go template engine.

I ended up writing my own static site generator which has a good chunk of the features of Hugo but focusing on ease of use rather than increasing the feature count.

> The speed of generation doesn't seem much of an added advantage since you're gonna do it only once anyway.

I have to disagree on that. My Pelican blog a few years back was taking several seconds to render vs milliseconds now and live reload is instant.