* A simple interface (Unlike e.g. Pelican, which uses Makefiles to prettify it's command line interface)
* A sane template engine (Basically ruling out anything Ruby. Jekyll's Liquid engine for example only provides includes, no template inheritance)
* No unnecessary large dependencies like requiring Django
* Freedom of choice (I want to use YAML and Markdown)
* Tightly coupled asset pipeline
* Enough building blocks to quickly solve most usecases
* Should easily be usable on Windows (No makefiles please, no compiler necessary to install)
* Pluggable theming and extension support
Most newer generators solve most of these problems. For some reason most of them are written in Ruby though, which to my surprise has very popular template engines which don't even provide template inheritance.