Does this exist? A related items plugin to control items and styles

I have already found some plugins that do part of what I need (like Eli’s Related Posts and the highly criticized nrelate plugin) – but nothing I can find will do this, or even most of it.

I have a customer that needs to be able to display different types of posts that they have and have them automatically take the post title and image and apply a specific style to it (like a different box color for each category, an icon if it’s a video, etc) and have it displayed at the bottom an either launch a light box or just link to the page.

Of course it also needs the ability to specify which posts are going to show up at the bottom of the page and not just leave it up to wordpress tagging relationships.

Does that make sense? Does anyone know of anything that will get us there or part way there?