My Jekyll work flow tends to involve: Write a blog. Publish. Recognise horrid markdown bugs. Go and fix already published blog.
I appreciate there are better workflows, but as a Windows user I'm not going to install Jekyll to publish locally and test, nor is my blog big enough to justify a test environment.
The "drafts" feature basically just takes a draft and publishes it. What would really make life easier is it the drafts feature would "publish this blog, but don't update the front page to link it". I could look at it knowing the URL, and get it right first.
That's my main use case. I've got my personal blog [1] setup as a Static Website Manager repository and connected to my personal AWS S3 bucket.
Whenever I need to make a little change I can edit locally in my editor of choice, commit and push to SWM where I can preview the changes before merging to my production bucket (all without installing Jekyll locally).
If I don't have my machine, I can also just login, edit the text and then follow the same preview/merge to deploy workflow.
As a fellow Windows user (at least at home) with a Jekyll blog deployed on GitHub pages, I would recommend using a web IDE such as c9.io or koding.com.
They are little VPSs with sudo access (and a private web server) so you can test "locally" there and then git push once you're ironed out bugs. In your Windows machine you only need a web browser.
Something that's possible with some static engines but not really catered to is the ability to include the contents of other markdown files into a page-
----page----
# Title
<< contents of /markdown/file >>
<< second file >>
<< third file >>
Useful if you have lots of sections that you want to combine in different ways, and update them all at the same time...
[1]: https://www.staticwebsitemanager.com
Are there any features the community would love to see offered in a Jekyll-based CMS?