It is indeed extremely user unfriendly at the start. You have to spend a god awful amount of time setting everything up, but in the end it's worth it IMHO.
I've been blogging for 3 years now with Jekyll, and typically my "new post workflow" consists in sending an email to a private address. It's all automatic from there on.
You're looking for http://prose.io, built to work with Jekyll.
OK, this project and that Substance editor are amazing.
Most of your points actually mean that Jekyll is fairly simple and customisable, which is user friendly for some users. (Others don't want/need this customisability and so it is unfriendly for them.)
Your final remark could be genuine, but I would rather assume you are sarcastically talking about github pages [http://pages.github.com/].
Um, you can use Markdown, and in the context of Github pages (http://pages.github.com/), that is exactly what you're talking about ...
Re:Jekyll CMS on Amazon S3 and MaxCDN
by hayksaakian on Friday February 01, 2013 @04:09AM
(#5149925)
I was genuinely unaware of the connection here. Thanks for posting that.
I have to create a text file, specify the layout, ensure the timestamp and title is in the filename, and then write HTML.
I am stunned no one has made a simple scaffold that lets me create a post with a button click and then use markdown to write, on a simple web app.