I guess I was thinking of "simple" in terms of the static HTML and deploy. I don't think you actually have to run any Ruby commands, you just run a command line task and it reads the textfiles from the specified directory.
Unless I missed it in the OP's description, one huge advantage that Jekyll has over the OP's bash solution is the ability to write in Markdown, made possible by the inclusion of Markdown parsing Ruby libraries. So the complexity added in the framework part, IMO, is more than made up in the simplicity of actual content-production.