advanced help required — using wp for a community

I am developing a new community using WordPress. I have found a lot of options with plugins to do the things I want to do however I’d like to hear other people’s ideas also incase the methods I am using are harder than they need to be.

This site is not live so I can not show how it is working right now, but this is the functionality I am going for:

This site is a community for students from a specific scholastic program. There is a message board where they can post and they also can create their own blog if they want. In addition to their own blog posts they are allowed to submit posts to the main blog (which are moderated) and they are allowed to make comments on blog postings of the main blog and of other students. They also want to be able to have a profile page whose fields are determined by the administrator (name, age, year of study, etc).

These are my problems thus far:

1) I have found many options for message boards integrated with wpress but so far none have worked very well. I can get them to share the username database but users have to log in and out of each separately. Even the message boards that claim users only need to log in to either wp or the msg board have not worked reliably. Not a huge deal but it is an inconvenience and may discourage people from using the entire site so if you can personally recommend one of the solutions I would appreciate it…

2) I have searched and searched and I can not figure out how I can allow users to have their own blogs. I can always use a solution outside of wordpress but I thought it would be pretty simple to let them be inside wordpress. Basically I could just create a category that was their username and then they could go to blogaddress.com/category/ and see their posts. Then somehow edit it so that they could not post to certain categories (is that possible?) That would be fine. BUT that leads me to my next problem:

3) I do not have the programming knowledge to fix this myself and I have yet to find any plugins which would help. I would like to make the control panel that users see WAY simpler. I don’t need them to see all the options they are not allowed to use. I would like simply for them to have an option to edit their profile information, make a post and to see the posts they have made, that is it. I have used the role manager but that does not fix the problem. When I create a user to test the system and I go into the control panel all the other options (like plugins, etc) are there still. Because of the role manager they are greyed out but they are still there. I would like to find a way for this to not look like a wordpress control panel. I don’t mind creating a new page template, I can do that kind of code editing without problem, but I have yet to figure out how to change the code of the actual wp programming to use a different template for users of a certain role…is this possible?

I apologize if this was confusing, I have tried my best to be clear. Any help at all is appreciated. I have been working on this for a few months and have tried hundreds of plugins but there are thousands more so I would not be surprised if I missed the best ones just by using the wrong keywords.

Thank you!