Building CARL in public: a WordPress alternative that generates real static files

I'm Carl. I've been building websites professionally for 15 years. For the past 8 years, I've been building HTML sites exclusively, mostly to escape WordPress after a single plugin destroyed 18 of my clients' sites in a single afternoon.

CARL is the system I built instead. It generates complete PHP files and writes them directly to your server. No runtime on page load. No plugin ecosystem. No attack surface. A visitor arrives, gets a file, and that's it.

I'm launching here in about 30 days, and I'm using this thread to share what I'm building, answer questions, and hear from anyone else who's been down the WordPress rabbit hole.

One question to start: what finally pushed you away from WordPress? Or if you're still on it, what's keeping you there?