I've made some Rails ActiveRecord models that to talk to the Wordpress database.

Using them and the page caching gem / feature, you can get the static page effect you are looking for.

Additionally, you can have all the Rails goodies (Haml, Sass, Coffeescript, layouts/partials, etc) for use in your Wordpress development needs along with the Wordpress authoring tools.

I have it working in my project, and took a half assed attempt to turn it into a gem. This is waaay premature, and missing lots of the stuff I have flushed out in my project (post_content formatting, short code completion, categories, tags, etc):

https://github.com/fowkswe/pressar

If anyone is interested, I'd be willing to fold the other functionality in and get the 'gem install' working.