I used lighttpd before OpenBSD's httpd, and while it is close, it still has far more features and configuration knobs. It's not just about whether things work by default (Apache usually does as well), but whether I fully understand what my configuration actually means, and what the server ends up doing.
I want to have a simple web server on my server at home to run a distro mirror and some other HTTP-centric things
I install lighttpd, and just dump all the files I want to serve in /var/www/localhost/htdocs
Start the daemon, bam, working. No messing about with htaccess or other things