It should be possible to use the basic core features of MediaWiki to build a very well-functioning website. Pages, templates, and categories are all it takes, and you get a simple text box and a one-to-one correspondence betwen page names and URLs. It's pretty easy to explain to people, and once the various reasonably simple syntax rules have been figured out there's really no end to what the user can do.
Or at least, that's the simplicity that I want to get back to sometimes!
That was the excitement about the original wikiwikiweb—not the fact that it made it easy to make a website. It was that it reduced the interface, make it all simpler and right there in one place. A single user interface for reading and for editing, and every reader could be an editor.
It's still that easy now (in 2018), and I think it's nice to remember that sometimes. It's all just text:
[[Link]]{{template-invocation}}[[Category:Topical phrases]]