Can I create an attractive, styled blog-like front end?

[slobizman]

I've been looking at Wordpress themes trying to find the best way to do a site where I let people post opinion articles (about the town we live in) and let other people post comments on them.

Then I thought, wait! What about using Vbulletin, its blogging function, and maybe Vbulletin (don't know if I nned this, I've never used Vbulletin)?

But I have some questions:

1) The forum "look" is too techy and I don't think will work. I need the front end to look more blog-like or news article-like. Just how closely can I achieve this look?) I understand once a user gets past the front end and into the forum, it will look like a forum), I'm looking for a very clean yet styled look.

2) Is there a way I can set user roles up so that until I approve of people as trusted writers, that I can approve articles prior to their posting?

3) When articles are shown on the home page in the blog article format, can I set it up to show excperts only rather than the full article?

Please note that I do not want to do any hacks to the code, just addon's and a theme. I have run a forum before and the hacks just too much to handle for me.