Plain HTML isn't very workable for a blog. You'd have to maintain:

- RSS/Atom

- the post list

- next / previous links

by hand (and remember to fix the link tests if you change some post title)

And if you want to change the page structure layout a bit, you'll have to update all the posts by hand as well.

You could do without all this but that means it's difficult for readers to follow what's your writing.

As others have pointed out, there are good reasons not to do that.

However, rolling your own SSG should take a few hours. You can look at features and CHANGELOGs of others, and decide if any of those sound neat to implement in your SSG, but to be honest, you can probably build something with a markdown converter or a liquid template library and `make` in about as much time as many SSGs require you to configure.

Want a specific theme from a well known SSG? If the license allows, port it.

I've been using hugo for a while and I'm running into similar issues. Considered jekyll and many others, but I've kind of resigned myself to spending a couple of evenings this week just writing my own very basic tool, probably based on a Makefile and some standard command line tools, and maybe a small amount of custom code that won't change under me (it'll be in my private repos).

The argument for a SSG is to make it possible to e.g. update your header or footer without this turning into a week process of changing thousands of blogposts.

find -exec sed

It is definitely possible, and it's possible to copy paste each blog post in a manually-maintained RSS.

But one will need to convince me that it's less annoying than having to use some sort of blog engine, static or otherwise.

You can write scripts to automate some stuff, but you are just easing into using a custom blog engine if you do this.