I was really looking forward to Grav when it came out as a beta. Back in those days it used to be small, easy to pick up, understand and develop upon, while at the same time being full of features. However as time went by, it got really fugly and now it's just as bloated as WP, if not more, with more than half of the code being third-party.
Automad stays small, fast and light on it's feet. It does, however, have some limitations, which may be addressed in the future, mainly being:
- plugins cannot modify or add their own dashboard UI controls/pages. It's possible to create a private page with such UI, but that's somewhat clunky, unintuitive and would require a lot of work and testing.
- multilanguage on frontend - if you follow the documentation, you can somewhat mimic it, but it's not SEO-friendly. I addressed it with my plugin, but it still needs development and testing before it's ready for a release, because the code already broke twice with changes made to AM.
So if you don't rely heavily on those two, then you'll have a good time using AM.