[jnbiche]

I disagree. The great thing about SSGs like Jekyll and Middleman is that they're very easy to build plugins for. Jekyll in particular is easy to learn, and easy to expand. I honestly can't imagine a bona fide programmer having that much difficulty picking up Jekyll.

If you did want to build a custom SSG, I think you're best bet is starting from Gulp, and building from there. At least then you can leverage the Gulp ecosystem instead of re-building everything yourself.