I think I'm giving up on trying to make my website "better" or "more efficient to work on". My attempts thus far have failed spectacularly, though if anyone sees this and thinks they could help me figure out 11ty, let me know, but for now I'm just going to go back to how I did it all before.
if the universe was capable of telling me to just update my RSS by hand and continue to just write code directly to the site, this was it, wtf dude