Well, a reason to care about the ugly codebase is that unless you're 100% satisfied with somebody else's theme out of the box, you're going to be tweaking it in

Well, a reason to care about the ugly codebase is that unless you're 100% satisfied with somebody else's theme out of the box, you're going to be tweaking it in a child theme (or a full fork), and wow it's ugly. But having said that, the ecosystem of WordPress is really hard to beat. The original linked post complains that WordPress won't do Markdown without a plugin, but y'know, so what? Jetpack gives me Markdown and great site statistics without Google Analytics. Out of the box, I get a reasonably solid taxonomy system with per-category RSS feeds, threaded comments with Gravatar support, and an API that lets me publish drafts directly from offline clients (including Ulysses, the writing app I was already using). More plugins give me Akismet anti-spam, microformats, webmentions, and per-post crossposting to Tumblr and Dreamwidth. (And Facebook, Medium, and a dozen other systems, if I chose to use them.) There are a lot of things I don't love about WordPress, but the reality is that it's damn hard to beat its user experience. I'd love it if something else stepped up to be a modern WordPress, but Jekyll, Hugo, et. al. just aren't it. (They're terrific at some things--I maintain a different site with Lektor, using it for things that WordPress wouldn't actually be very good at--but it's not a blog.) Ghost is the closest attempt I'm aware of, but between their launch and their recent 1.0 release, they refocused on being a platform for "building and running a modern online publication. I can't help but feel there's still a real opportunity out there for "modern WordPress competitor," although I don't know if it's a market opportunity--which is, one suspects, why it remains unfilled.