I've yet to try it but that's the downside that would slightly annoy me. Probably not enough to turn me off of it, but maybe. Would post-commit hooks and some kind of automation make it easier?
In general: What would be the best approach towards having a part of the website static (main part), and only the blog/press part being regenerated?
Does Hugo/Pelican/Jekyll/Hakyll etc handle this kind of functionality?
As an alternative, what would be a good light weight CMS these days (ideally in Python)?