TL;DR

I do not have time to maintain a home built blogging platform. WordPress is the practical choice for me.

Why not build it myself?

I could make this site much simpler or far more complex without WordPress. I have been in IT long enough to know what to code and what to buy. My time is better spent on coding for a salary than on platform upkeep.

What do I build?

At work I have built a dozen plus BizTalk custom components, several APIs, and a management portal.
Privately I prefer ease of management. Applying security updates instead of writing them gives me peace of mind, especially for a public site with no sensitive data.

Why WordPress over other options?

WordPress has a large community and long history. It is open source, mature, and well supported.
I like Ghost, but the smaller community and feature set could leave me maintaining patches or building features myself. That is not what I want for this blog.

“You could have done this in Vim without a framework”

Definitely!

I aim for that level of minimalism. I have not mastered terminal editors yet, but heavy IDEs still frustrate me at times (looking at you Android Studio). For now I reach for nano more often than Vim.