IIRC, Ghost was a (unrealistic) vision of what a minimalist branch from WP would be like. It was unrealistic because trying to maintain some compatibility with WP's ecosystem is probably something you can't do just somewhat, like pregnancy.<p>So not having WP compatibility makes it less of an initial attraction to established bloggers...OTOH, we definitely need a good, minimal self-hosting blogging solution between Wordpress and Jekyll. Hopefully the next generation of bloggers will realize that even WP is more than they need, just as many modern WP sites eschewed Drupal (qz.com, for example, and several major traditional news websites)