That was kinda my point. The middle ground doesn't hold much benefit (as far as I can see) - you have to manage the complexity yourself and it's risky. I'd either want a simple system that's not goint to blow up on me (i.e. static files) or I want a fully functional system that's run by someone else (i.e. livejournal).
I recently migrated my WP.org blog to WP.com because of this. Now I feel safe.
Nevertheless, I publish my personal site using Emacs' Org-mode and if I were to start a blog from scratch I would use something like org-mode or jekyll.
Probably because I need the feeling of being in control of my data.
