I wouldn't call it insane at all. WordPress isn't sexy, but it works really well for exactly the use case you're describing. With WP, you can give contributors

I wouldn't call it insane at all. WordPress isn't sexy, but it works really well for exactly the use case you're describing. With WP, you can give contributors a friendly graphical interface to write with and they're off to the races. With a static site generator, you have to first teach them some technical stuff that most writers won't know coming in (Markdown, Git, etc.). That's not impossible to do, but it adds friction and discourages contributions. I guarantee you no writer who doesn't know Git will appreciate you forcing them to learn it. Yes, you need hosting to run WordPress, but WordPress hosting is widely available for dirt cheap, including from the WP team themselves at https://wordpress.com https://wordpress.com. And WordPress expertise is also widely available and relatively cheap, so if your project turns out to be a big success and you need help scaling it up, that help is not hard to find. There are certainly categories of site that WordPress isn't a good fit for -- you wouldn't want to build an SPA on top of it, I mean -- but for the specific case of publishing a multi-user blog, it is very nearly a perfect fit.