I find it interesting that the static website ever went out of favour for this kind of site. The simplest approach is usually the best.
I have one website that is compiled using make and sed. Tools most programmers already have on hand. It took no virtually no time to setup and it gets the job done quite gracefully, while still leaving room to be integrated into a more complex system should the future site's needs dictate it.
I think the evolution was driven by the desire to have non-technical people be able to maintain websites. The easiest way to do this is a web app, and once you have a web app, making the entire site dynamic is (a) easy (b) opens the door to tons of shiny possibilities.
Obviously, there were significant efforts in the maintainable static site space, such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, but I think those ultimately lost out to the flashiness of dynamic websites.
I have one website that is compiled using make and sed. Tools most programmers already have on hand. It took no virtually no time to setup and it gets the job done quite gracefully, while still leaving room to be integrated into a more complex system should the future site's needs dictate it.