There are definitely different trade-offs to be made on storage, but it would seem that using both a database and a flat-file structure would be the worst of bo

There are definitely different trade-offs to be made on storage, but it would seem that using both a database and a flat-file structure would be the worst of both worlds. If the database is used to serve the content it must be online, and so you lose one of the big appeals of static-sites: That they are static and can be served trivially. If you're writing in text-files you need some kind of update-process which might become tricky if you edit past-entries, etc. I suspect that publishing with one command doesn't really matter too much on technology; in my own case I just use a Makefile: * Download the comments from the remote server, via rsync. * Rebuild the blog. * Upload the generated HTML-site, via rsync.