I think what's missing for static site generators to gain traction is a consumer-friendly admin interface. Kirby comes to mind here: http://getkirby.com/
Is it so hard for people to learn Markdown? Not just geeks, but anyone? How hard is it compared to learning the myriad of word processing tools that you're expected to know by high school? How much time does it take to learn Markdown compared to the minutes per day that you spend trying to debug the hidden markup of Rich Text/WYSIWYG editors (e.g., why is this text have the same font-weight as the headings now)?
Once the average person learns how to disassociate content from presentation and how markup is the key thing, then static site generators, and the real power of simplicity, become obvious.
I think that's a battle already lost.
I agree. When I worked for a company that mostly sold custom websites to smallish companies, our sales guy would show his marks the TinyMCE interface and they loved it. I reckon we sold a lot of websites to people who believed we were giving them the ability to manage their own content easily.
Even better, we were able to generate more revenue when those people invariably messed up their content and needed us to fix it. So really it's win-win.
I hate those editors with a passion, and though I like tools like Markdown (and Git), they are still problematic for people to use.
In many ways I don't see why the editor can't be right there as a first class citizen in the browser like it used to be. Linking and embedding needs to be simple.
Average users don't really want to get to grips with html or some other markup language. But it would be great if at least they could grok linking.