Advice – Can WordPress do this…

Hello! First off, love WordPress. Started my own site (uncannyconway.com) some time ago and it’s perfect…well maybe not the site but WordPress is.

I am working on a new project. Due to the complexity of the new site I thought maybe I should try Joomla since it won’t be so much of a blog. So far trying to use that system is making me go bald. Plus the extensions to make it do what I want don’t just cost money, they cost a LOT of money.

Anyway. The new site I’m looking to do needs to:
1) House a few hundred pages.
2) Have up to 4 sub categories off of about 20 main categories.
3) Need to somehow label pages between “Proven”, “Experimental” and “Failed” and clearly group by these labels. Example: a list of articles with a spacer between each label group.
4) A navigation system that can organize all of this. I was looking at some sort of page directory, like the old Yahoo look but instead of linking external pages just displaying all the sections in an easy to way method to find information.

Maybe I should be looking for a Wiki like CMS? Maybe there’s a WordPress extension that can provide something close to this? Eventually I’ll need to hire a professional designer/programmer but I can’t invest that kind of money until I can prove that the site will have merit and could gain subscribers.

Possible to make WordPress do this? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks so much for any advice!