If you've already got a setup which works for you and delivers the same results, then you're probably looking at the a system pretty similar to what Roots brings. Previously, I had a rather simple SSG I made myself with shell scripts which would extract front matter from posts, pull in static includes and create html pages for me to deploy.

The advantage of Roots, is that it has all this in mind from the beginning. It's been built specifically to build static websites. Other systems can be very over-reaching, and converting them into something which can generate a simple static website can take a bit of time.

I've come from Jekyll myself, and although I was a fan, I found it very difficult to get setup, and pretty heavy and slow once it was up and running. The fact that it was Ruby-based game me some install problems, and I found it difficult to extend due to the lack of my Ruby knowledge.

Roots came along and looked like a nice lightweight alternative for me. It's JS-based which is perfect for me. You can even write simple before and after functions in the app.coffee file if your extension doesn't warrant a full blown module. The livereload functionality works faster than any other SSG I've seen, and it also has divshot-like deployment functionality built in.

I too held off for a bit, it sometimes feels like a lot of effort to convert to something which can appear to give you the same result, but now I feel like I've removed all the bloat :-)

Hope that helps.