I have handed the CMS keys for Ghost to non-technical people with good results. There's no doubt that it's more limited (especially in terms of plugin ecosystem) than WP, but that lack feels liberating. No need to agonize over which contact form plugin is the right one to go with, etc. And Ghost is certainly snappy [0].
Custom code is great if you have staff programmers. If you do not, one of the upsides to WordPress is letting end customers - not the programmers - agonize over which plugins to use.