I looked at Hexo, Assemble, Wintersmith, Docpad, Metalsmith, and many others. I wanted flexibility to restructure as I saw fit and easily add structures other than just blogs. I tried docpad but it struck me as too "tell you how it's gonna be", even setting your front end template. Metalsmith (http://www.metalsmith.io/) was a great solution to that. It's a lot like using Gulp and Express' middleware plugins. I liked that I could completely customize the build pipeline to get exactly what I wanted. There's also a way to do your build pipeline with config files, if that's your cup of tea.