alt Hacker NewsGenerally I think you have a point when making landing pages or things of that sort. I however basically only use static site generators for blogging and I think markdown/asciidoc/whatever + metadata is nicer for writing content than directly in HTML.
I made nixtml and I take no offence :)
I think part of my take stems from the fact that I'm old enough to remember when SGML was supposed to solve all our problems.