I tried a bunch of similar static site generators: mixure, wintersmith, yeoman, middleman, roots, etc etc. They all fell short in some way or another.

Then I taught myself to use grunt.js. It was kind of a PITA to get the hang of (apparently gulp.js is way easier) but I definitely saw the light. Grunt is what a lot of these other tools use "under the hood", you define the things you want to do ahead of time (for ex: "compile my coffeescript and scss, then move the images in this folder to another folder") and it does them when your source files change. My advice: ditch the fluff, just learn how to use a task runner to compile your files yourself :)

Here's my boilerplate to help you get started. It does stylus, jade, coffeescript, a web server, and live reload out of the box: https://github.com/sampl/grunt-boilerplate. AWS deployment with one command is pretty straightforward, ask me if you need help!