I've been using MT since 2003 and never thought it was terrible. Publishing times (full-site publishing) was always slow but publishing an entry only took a few seconds. The new Melody project forked MT and updated the UI, it looks great now.
I used MovableType when rebuilding steves-digicams.com (not by choice), and it really slowed to a crawl when we did a full publish (30,000+ articles). Luckily we only had to do that a few times when setting up the site. I don't see the advantage of static files being worth the hassle of publishing when you can achieve the same or better results using a caching proxy like Varnish. We used Varnish in front of Apache on ultimatecoupons.com (all dynamic, built in the Symfony PHP framework), and once cached, pages load in 15ms (first byte in browser).
