Wordpress is fine for what it is, but it's also an upgrade treadmill. You can kind of bypass that by letting the php process running wordpress have access to write to the code directory so wordpress can upgrade itself, but then your php process has access to write to the code directory.

A blog is mostly a static site that changes occasionally, a static site genetator is a much better fit. Caveat: comments, but personally, I don't want to moderate, and the WordPress site I administerred for work didn't want comments either (but even with them disabled, somehow new comments and trackbacks got into the database). When I finally got approval to turn our blog into a mostly static site, it was joyous, and the server(s) stopped burning cpu like nobody's business to serve the same handful of pages. We used PHP to manage serving translated blog entries, but it's not that much slower than a fully static file when your PHP logic is dead simple and short.

SSGs are a lot cheaper and easier to serve.