[jimmiles]

But VVV is aimed at developers; the OP describes a different use case, in which he also eloquently explains my dilemma, and that I'm sure of many others: we want to write for our blog, not develop our blog. I am very interested in his project going forward...

[sureIy]

I don’t see that issue, really. If you don’t want to develop WP, then use a hosted platform or static builder. If you factor your time spent on tweaking this “simple” proposed setup, you’ll see that $20/month is actually a great deal.

Even when I was a WP developer, none of my personal websites were in WP, they all lived on static hosts that needed zero maintenance.