I use Hugo and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It has a lot of layout templates you can use out of the box so you don’t need to learn a new templating language unless you want to do customizations. I write blogs in markdown and it’s automatically rendered and published.

That’s just a consequence of decentralization. That’s why all names are qualified by the instance name as well. It’s not perfect, but we’ll, on Reddit if someone picked the sub name you wanted then you’re sol and have to choose a different name, so there’s pros and cons to each. Simply subscribe to the most active version of the community you’re interested in and network effects will pick the winner.

I think the biggest problem with bootstrapping niche communities is that people interested in those topics have to search for and find the communities. There are a few resources for finding new communities such as https://lemmyverse.net/communities and the Reddit migration community, but it takes some effort.