Check out Craft CMS! https://craftcms.com

This gives a brief introduction to Craft, you will fall in love <3 https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/introduction-to-craft-cms--cms-22982

Here's full CSS control in Kirby: https://getkirby.com/docs/cookbook/art-directed-blog-posts

I really like Perch for this very reason. It can handle my nav, CSS, and content if I want it to, but I don't have to put it in the CMS. Any page can have a completely different design that departs from other designs, but you can still make it really easy for non-developers to update images, copy, etc. If you already have a site that needs a CMS, Perch is also really good in that case. I have a few Perch licenses for myself and some customers.

https://grabaperch.com

Anchor CMS was designed for this, though I don't know if people are still working on it. I believe it was initially built by @idiot

Edit: Yes, it's still in active dev: https://github.com/anchorcms/anchor-cms

I switched to Perch CMS due to some of the same concerns you are having. You can also download and test it locally before you buy to see if it fits your needs. Perch CMS

Surprised nobody has thrown out SiteLeaf yet.

Perch. Just, perch. Perch solves all cms questions imho.

Perch CMS is my content management system of choice, which aligns so well with my 'traditional' UI design workflow, and 'common' front-end developer skillset. The fact that it just doesn't 'touch', nor dictates the front-end code, makes its usage natural, and output code's quality limitless. It doesn't want to do anything, but managing content well.

The sense of achievement will come soon, as documentation is great. Though it's not a must, basic knowledge of php will help you make most out of it.

After using Perch CMS, template-based workflows' twisted logic will seem too unnatural.

I'm a big fan of https://statamic.com. Super-duper customizable CMS and excellent control over the styling of pages and content.

Hammer for Mac: https://hammerformac.com/

You can probably get a lot of what you're after using Webflow. Their CMS is quite good and gives you decent flexibility of design.

I really like using https://forestry.io/ with Jekyll

Super easy and clean

I LOVE Jekyll for custom, clean sites that you can then add on your CMS of choice (Forestry.io or Siteleaf are great options.)

Besides building sites Jekyll makes for a really great build tool when building themes or production sites as well. My dev/design workflow lately has been: Illustrator > Jekyll > Wordpress + Timber > Bedrock/Trellis for deployment and it works like a charm :) hope this helps!

fyi http://work.co/ appear to use https://www.contentful.com/.

Jekyll

KeystoneJS is excellent if you want to avoid PHP and SQL. Pure JavaScript from back to front. We built our public site using Keystone. Pro-tip: use the beta which is written in React. Admin side is super snappy, if a little sparse.

The CMS controls every aspect of our site including all the text you see, images, background colors of tiles, meta data, open graph social data, etc. Really you can customize it to control anything. It comes with built-in Cloudinary integration which is great for serving CDN-backed responsive images (and free if your site isn't going to be getting thousands of hits per week).

For some guidance, the SydJS website is built on Keystone and you can peruse the code on Github.

EDIT: 9 July 2018

We actually moved to Squarespace. Content editors had difficulty using the Keystone interface. Having made the switch, I can definitely recommend Squarespace as a nice, minimal CMS. We wrote about the switch on our blog.

EDIT: 3 October 2019

And now we have moved to Webflow because... duh. Full write up coming soon.

Jekyll.

I've started using prismic.io — a headless cms similar to contentful. Its still pretty cheap and really good support online and on their slack channel.

Kirby. Thank me later.

You should check out Netlify CMS (https://www.netlifycms.org/). If you have a GitHub account it's really easy to set up and get running.

Could always try something like Contentful - https://www.contentful.com/ - that just gives you all the content as JSON so you can do whatever you want with it.

try https://thegrid.io/

I am really not sure if I really got your problem, but to me it seems like you don't really get how flexible the structure of kirby is. As everything you are complaining about is actually possible with that cms. I already worked with Wordpress, Grav, Pagekit and OctoberCMS and almost every feature is possible in that frameworks. The example of work.co is not a question of cms, they just used react for the frontend, for the cms you could even use wordpress or any other api-cms out there...

I really enjoy bludit

For something brutally simplistic - I used to use Stacey CMS

Uses a folder based cms, so no 'real' backend as such. You just upload images and text files to your server and they will be displayed as a website with projects and pages etc.

I'm using Dropplets like Kirby but it's free. maybe not better than Kirby but I think it's fit with me.