Honest question, because I'm either missing something here, or you're throwing money out the window and in which case: message me about developing something for you.
The site is open source if you want to see what it's doing:
https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io
And here is all the work that Andrew, the blog's developer, did:
https://github.com/mtlynch/mtlynch.io/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author...
The repo does a lot more than a vanilla Jekyll install would provide. There are automated build checks to make sure the pages render with proper HTML, no dead links, that the correct headers are in place for social sharing.
Vanilla Jekyll doesn't handle image resizing very well, so Andrew did a lot of work to add in the right plugin to handle it and to go back through all of my old posts to update the images.
It was also important to me to have Github gist-style file includes, but I didn't want to split my content between my blog and external gists, so Andrew added support for file embeddings within my pages.
There's also just routine work in keeping packages up to date. Every few months, there will be a neat feature I want in either my theme or Jekyll itself, so we have to upgrade, but often that generates work to check that the upgrade didn't break anything.
You might still look at that and say it's not that much work, but there's complexity in keeping all of it working together. It's worth it to me to have the look and functionality I want on my blog without having to interrupt my writing to do it myself.
I'm sure I could find someone who will work for cheaper, but Andrew is great because he's rigorous and an excellent communicator. I've worked with other Jekyll developers and they've all burned so much of my time not understanding what I want, explaining things poorly, or expecting me to catch the errors in their work. When I make feature requests to Andrew, he gets what I'm asking right away, lays out the options with the benefits and drawbacks of each, and does the work correctly the first time.
1) Why bother with all this technical excellence if you do not know even if your site will still exist an year from now? Poor analogy: you are building a Ferrari to deliver food.
2) You could adapt this tech to create another version of https://carrd.co, targeting another niche. That seems a more promising product that would benefit more from your tendency for technical excellence.