> none of them are really designed to handle that much complexity
Be careful what you wish for! I had used Nikola, but every release kept handling more complexity. Which meant an ever increasing number of options, but most annoyingly a large number of warnings due to config options that had changed, been obsoleted, interacted differently etc. Nikola is one of those tools that generates an initial config file for you, which exacerbates the problem since you probably don't use all the config items, and then have this option warning mess due to those items.
Yes you can install a version pinned version of the tool, but then have to do the same with all the dependencies. Before you know it, Wordpress seems easy and trivial.
Never tried Nikola, but I'm painfully aware of the problem. I think I've tried and migrated through enough SSGs at this point though that I think I can write something better.
The main problem IS the config imo. That and plugins (and their configs). Don't know if you've tried Vue's new CLI, but my idea is if I don't want to or can't abstract away the complexity without imposing limits on flexibility, the next best thing is to "visually" abstract it by making the configuration happen in a UI like Vue's CLI. This will get rid of errors because you would be able to stop the user choosing conflicting actions, and things that cannot be abstracted in a config, usually CAN be in a UI. Main one, for example, and the one I'm focusing on is routing. There's tons there that can be abstracted in a UI there. You can also add hints, links, etc in a UI. There would be no need to be looking at the docs all the time. In the future hopefully I can expand the idea further to include an editor, but I have to keep my goals reasonable or I will never finish.
As for how many features and how complex, after migrating my site so many times I feel the following should be included (because if they're third party plugins they end up un-maintained): RSS, Sitemaps, Image Resizing, and maybe Embeds
PS: I tried wordpress with a static generator plugin once, it was horrifying, never going back. Even ignoring the static generator plugin, it still did barely better than the previous SSG I'd been using. The plugins were all of wildly varying quality. In particular I was constantly fighting the one that resized my images.
Be careful what you wish for! I had used Nikola, but every release kept handling more complexity. Which meant an ever increasing number of options, but most annoyingly a large number of warnings due to config options that had changed, been obsoleted, interacted differently etc. Nikola is one of those tools that generates an initial config file for you, which exacerbates the problem since you probably don't use all the config items, and then have this option warning mess due to those items.
Yes you can install a version pinned version of the tool, but then have to do the same with all the dependencies. Before you know it, Wordpress seems easy and trivial.