TL;DR:

sudo pacman -S pandoc entr python

# rerun build script whenever a `index.md` or `template.html` file is updated:
find . \( -name index.md -o -name template.html \) | entr python build.py

# host static website locally at port 8000:
python -m http.server --bind localhost

This is a ghetto static site setup powered by pandoc and some glue code, inspired by this post.

The gist is that this whole repo is a ready-to-serve static website. The build.py script looks for all files named index.md and run pandoc on them, generating index.html files in the same place as their respective markdown files.

Pros:

• Dead simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get site structure.
• Post-specific assets are put in the same dir as the post's md file. This allows simple relative image paths without stupid hacks (looking at you, Pelican!)
• Pandoc's markdown-to-html translator is simply better: automatic <figure> element for top-level images was why I considered pandoc in the first place.
• Maximum flexibility: I can already see how custom pages will be a breeze with this setup, since each page is extremely self-contained. I can finally do crazy stuff like Zach Holman's blog.

Cons:

• No automatic index generation (that I know of).
• No RSS feed out of the box.

I'll need to tinker more.