I can't speak for Hugo but no, Pelican is not a framework. It's a static site generator. I cannot make general purpose, dynamic websites with Pelican. I can fake a few things, I can hook it up to cron to mimic it, but Pelican itself is concerned primarily with your data store, your theme, and generating static files to upload directly to your webspace.
Sure, you can make plugins for Pelican to make it generate things the way you want, but it's still just a generator/builder using Jinja templates and Markdown or some other text transformation tool.
Also, there's no real indicator that I used Pelican to build my site. There's no cruft I'm including in my <head> element or anything else. It outputs regular-ass HTML.
I'm sure it's nice to be able to swap into dynamic web app mode if you decide a project's going differently than expected, but I don't run into that much with the things I design. I usually know from the beginning which tech I'll need to achieve the goal.
Frameworks force the dev into specific ways of doing things, so if a program fits into that architecture, go nuts. I'm curious what you guys need on your sites that require so much JS.
