Hugo is great, until...
Hugo is great! I love that I can write markdown files and it automatically and quickly converts them to a modern and good looking site. Its shortcodes are useful for introducing custom HTML elements in a simple and reusable manner. It is not only good at doing the things it was designed to do, it's great at it. But as soon as you try to do something different, something just slightly outside of what was intended, everything falls apart.
It supports syntax highlighting for code blocks, but I wanted to try a Lua script I wrote for rendering Lua code to pretty HTML with CSS classes that I can modify in my stylesheet. Well, Hugo can't do that. You either use a preprocessor to modify all your markdown files before and then use Hugo, or you're screwed.
I could modify Hugo's source code, but the codebase is large and I'm not that familiar with Go. It's not worth it. Also, Hugo's shortcodes don't let you call external programs. So I'm out of options.
Another problem with shortcodes is that you are locked in to using Hugo to render your files. Take the same markdown file to another converter and those fancy shortcodes are useless.
Also it bothers me that it generates an RSS file for all pages in my site. I only need it for this blog. I don't want an RSS file for my landing page.
It's a shame because it beautifully manages the bilingual aspect of my website.