Static site generators focus on the wrong thing

It partially depends on how you choose to deploy. If you are compiling your site locally and then pushing the static HTML to a server, you might experience some delay in generating the site. If you use GitHub pages, you just git push and the changes show up almost instantly. I've never run into the case where I felt like it took too long to go from my git push to seeing the post live in the browser - by the time I switch to the browser and refresh the page, the post is there.

I do think that most of the static site generators focus on the wrong thing. The main appeal of a SSG to me is that you can focus solely on the content and none of the other crap typically associated with blogging (updating wordpress/security issues, trying to write in some stupid WYSIWYG web form, dicking around with formatting tags, setting up caching plugins because my blog falls over when it's on HN) - all I do is write some Markdown and I'm done.

I agree with the difficulty in using SSG and the friction that deploying them creates (especially when you have to update something on all posts). Having used a few SSG in the past, I have now been using Ghost regularly and greatly enjoy it (the live-view next to "markdown"-view is very well done).

The hosted version of Ghost is amazingly simply to use. Sign up and publish. Done. The download and self-host is a bit more difficult, but nothing any tech-savy person shouldn't be able to figure out.

To me, the simplicity of Ghost is the best feature and trumps any missing features.

I think the usefulness of a SSG really depends on your goals. If your goal is simply to publish a blog, perhaps a SSG is not the right solution for you. SSGs are interesting because they have zero external dependences. I can just deploy my blog to Amazon S3, use CloudFront if I so choose, and never have to worry about scalability or how much traffic my blog can handle. To me, that is more important than the perceived friction that it takes to get a post online.

"I feel that Hakyll sites are least updated and most abandoned. Of course, there are outliers. But I am focusing on the majority."

"Not often updated and mostly abandoned" describes most blogs, no matter which technology is used to create them.

It's true that static site generators are not frictionless, but I think they have the least friction of any non-hosted alternative---at least if you can keep from screwing around with the generator all the time. Hosted alternatives are a completely different matter.

This is an argument that literally goes back to the dawn of the CMS.

CMS designs tend to fall somewhere between two extremes: completely static (grinding out HTML files) and completely dynamic (generating new pages for each request). Static is appealing because it scales like crazy, but it's also unappealing because it requires a "compilation"/"rebuilding" step that gets longer and longer as your site gets bigger. Dynamic is appealing because it requires no "rebuilding" step, you just click "Save" and your words immediately appear, but it's also unappealing because "live pages" equals "lots of hits to the database", which makes scaling to handle even moderate amounts of traffic a problem. In other words, there is no "silver bullet" approach, just a set of tradeoffs.

The market oscillates between these two extremes, usually on the basis of whatever product is fashionable at the moment -- a new It Product gets lots of buzz for the positive elements of its choice of static/dynamic, which are apparent immediately, but its newness means it hasn't been used long enough for people to experience the downsides. Those come later. And when they do, people flee to a new It Product on the other end of the spectrum, where the process repeats.