Idea for multi-author site

I have an idea that I’m having trouble figuring out how to implement.

I am building a multi-author WP site on a niche topic of self-improvement. A small number of approved authors post articles about the topic, mostly suggestions and other useful info for others based on their experience and knowledge. I already have this set up, and I have code in place to display the latest and most popular of their articles on the homepage, stuff like that.

But I also want to add lots more lesser-experienced people who will be pretty much blogging about their own process of applying the ideas and suggestions presented on the site. I haven’t implemented this at all yet.

I want to somehow keep the bloggers’ posts separate from the other authors, without installing a second copy of WP. I’m thinking just set the bloggers as Contributors, and rely on custom scripts to filter the post lists, author lists, etc, to make it appear as if the blog posts are a separate thing from the authors’ articles.

An alternative I’m considering is just making everyone the same user role, and when a smart person makes an excellent post that is generally useful to everyone, I will manually flag it as such. Otherwise I will consider everything just a normal blog post.

Has anyone else run into questions like this designing a multi-author site where you want to feature different classes of authors in different ways?