Hugo is nice and extremely fast. But one thing that I find unintuitive in Hugo is how the layout files are arranged. I can never remember them without referring to the documentation or the source files of an existing Hugo site everytime I need to create a new Hugo site.

For example, the base layout template needs to go to themes/<THEME>/layouts/_default/base.html but the layout for a blog needs to go to themes/<theme>/layouts/<TYPE>/single.html. Then there is list type layout too to define the blog index pages. Is the home page a single page or a list page? Can the entire home page be defined as a base template? It gets confusing.

Then the whole {{ define <BLOCK> }} and {{ block <BLOCK> }} syntax to embed one template in another is quite unintuitive as well. I think Jekyll has much more sane layout that is easy to keep in head. Also in Jekyll one can define list pages without any special naming convention just by using its templating for-loops. I find Hugo less intuitive than others but the fact that Hugo does not require me to learn Ruby is a win.

Custom written shell commands or Python code or even plain SSI includes are a great way to host static content too.