Fair enough.
I would never suggest that somebody who is happy with vim switch to Emacs. Use what works for you; my preference is just that, and not a prescription.
Actually, it was because pandoc had proved a bottleneck. While I was doing parallel processing and converting multiple posts at a time, it could still take over ten minutes just to rebuild all of my site’s pages and posts.
I had also found that I was embedding raw HTML in my markdown files whenever I wanted to do something that Markdown didn’t support, like the <details> element.
I’m not the only one who found it preferable to just write HTML, incidentally.
The makefile might be handy, too. It’s in the same directory and just called “Makefile”.