Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).
Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'.
But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with.
The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac...
I think all the content was in handwritten HTML, but the generator knew enough to be able to do the navigation links and sitemap and so on.