Advice for gameplan, new site

[scorchnoma]

I have had some experience assisting in the operation of vBulletin powered websites and as such, and from what I know, I would like to use it as a starting point for a new site that I'm going to be (hopefully) putting up shortly. Unfortunately, my knowledge of web programming ends at clumsily tweaking pre-written assemblies, and from what I'm seeing, this may have to change quickly if I want to make this happen. However, before reinventing the wheel, I figured it was worth asking the experts if they could point me in the right direction so I can assemble a pre-launch shopping list and game plan (and possible crash course education plan).

Here are my goals:

This is going to be primarily a resource and product/service review site. I am going to need to create review items but I want to also have a means for registered users to rate and discuss the items. Is there anything out there to create forms for creating threads, and only allow use of forms for certain areas of the forum while maintaining open posting on others?

Secondly, I want to be able to create a searchable tag system filled in by the submission form, is there any way to assign attributes to posts via the form submission system I described above? I would like to have the items searchable by geographical area, category, and if possible, ratings, as well as being able to tag items as reviewable or not to facilitate article creation via item submission forms.

Thirdly, I will need to create a summary page displaying the data from the form filled out to create the thread and the rating only, without showing the discussion (discussion will be linked). I would like to use this method for creating articles as well.

Lastly, is there any way to change the poll system into, for example, a 1-10 rating scale which would display the average rating value (total rating points divided by voter number).

Basically from what I know of vBulletin the member and item (post) framework is all there, the trick for me will be making it work the way I want it to and to communicate cohesively with what I want to add. I plan on having a forum anyhow, I would love to make it all work as one unit. Thank you in advance for the advice!