I've tried to use Hugo multiple times and absolutely hated it.
It's in a very weird spot in terms of difficulty/productivity.
It's got a very steep learning curve, with a lot of complexity. Things like how it resolves certain values involve following multiple steps that may or many exist in your project and require knowing framework specific rules and terminology. Stuff like which template is used is so complicated. All the other stuff about taxonomy and archetypes, etc also get really confusing.
But all that complexity translated to very little productivity (for me at least). I struggled with setting up beautiful templates, and found all the extra configuration cumbersome because the simple things I wanted to do was buried under all this other crap I had to learn about.
And when I did need advanced features, I didn't want to use hugo. Or things that I did need, were core aspects that were difficult to do with hugo because it's core configuration is so bloated.
Not to mention all the problems with versions and documentation that I had when one at least one of the occasions I tried it.
I looked into using Hugo and some other SSGs and eventually decided to hack together my own minimal version in Python.
It doesn't do much, it doesn't handle Markup (because that's not how I want to work), and it probably took less time than really mastering someone else's SSG.
It's in a very weird spot in terms of difficulty/productivity.
It's got a very steep learning curve, with a lot of complexity. Things like how it resolves certain values involve following multiple steps that may or many exist in your project and require knowing framework specific rules and terminology. Stuff like which template is used is so complicated. All the other stuff about taxonomy and archetypes, etc also get really confusing.
But all that complexity translated to very little productivity (for me at least). I struggled with setting up beautiful templates, and found all the extra configuration cumbersome because the simple things I wanted to do was buried under all this other crap I had to learn about.
And when I did need advanced features, I didn't want to use hugo. Or things that I did need, were core aspects that were difficult to do with hugo because it's core configuration is so bloated.
Not to mention all the problems with versions and documentation that I had when one at least one of the occasions I tried it.