We use Hugo for our site's blog and we really appreciate the speed of compilation and the overall simplicity [1]. That said, it can be frustrating that it's not really possible to add or modify markdown extensions. If you want to do something as simple as adding some custom classes to tables and rows then you're pretty much out of luck. The closest that you can get is to switch out the renderer for mmark and use inline attributes, but that's still extremely limited. We often end up writing HTML in the templates when I would much rather be able to extend the renderer. I understand that this is a trade-off and that there are benefits to each side, but I wish that I understood the limitations better before deciding to go with Hugo.
On the other hand, python-markdown is an extremely well-designed library and it's an absolute joy to hack on and extend. Once upon a time, I used it to throw together an API documentation renderer for Mono class library documentation on a now dead product [2]. Overall, I enjoyed that a lot more than my experience with Hugo and I will probably use something python based for my next static site.
I've tried a few static site generators and I've written my own in Python. But they all sucked at some point - despite Hugo! Hugo is incredible fast, offers many features and is pleasant to use. But the killer feature is: Hugo just works out of the box without the need for an annoying setup. Just copy the binary and you are done!
