Category or custom theme…

I’ve spent the evening chasing down google links to try and figure the answer out on my own but have no idea if I’m on the right track. It’s my first project with WP.

I’m trying to show an archive of 180 magazines that my old company that I worked for published. I’d like to list each magazine by Month/Year/Issue and then have the articles in each magazine under their corresponding section of the magazine. For simplicity sake each magazine had 4 sub sections like; president’s letter, ask the expert, main feature article and sub feature article.

After searching this forum and google it seemed the best course was to use Categories for each issue and the sub categories for the 4 articles within each magazine. This seems like a lot of work (180 categories and 720 subcategories).

The end result I’m looking to achieve is to have a page called Library that displays a link to each year’s issues, when a year is selected, the user is then present with 12 issues and clicking on the issue shows the 4 articles from that issue and finally clicking on each link shows that article.

Are categories and sub categories the best way to handle this and should I use some of the plugins like PostList or should this be accomplished with a custom theme? Not even sure the right question to ask! Thanks.