Ditto, but I settled on Pelican because Python, which makes it far more hackable IMO.
Hugo's speed is overrated (and overstated). Anything with caching (like Pelican) makes this somewhat of a non-issue IMO. Incidentally, the longest part of generation for me is thumbnails and other asset bundling, which is essentially imagemagick.
Having said that, Hugo does many things right and is pretty fully featured, so it's hard not to recommend. It would be nice if all static site generators used the same format (front matter?) so switching engines could be more seamless.
For a bizzare reason you cant combine pagination and categories in Jekyll?
I had to try to hack add ons like jekll paginate.
Hugo actually had all the features I wanted but It was something to do with the locations of templates for custom collections were in a very opinionated yet weird place and the docs werent super clear about how it worked?
And theres literally only a handful of tutorials.
Theres a lot of good about Hugo though and Im not denigrating it all.
Middleman was just perfect on every level.
Elegant, customizable, feature rich, with great docs.
Its also Ruby so its like an evolved Jekyll pokemon.
I found middleman to be the most powerful static site generator.