Is WordPress the right tool for this?

I have an existing site to which I want to add a newspaper component. My goals are clean presentation of content, ease of content management (including comment management), and the flexibility to deal elegantly with the fact that I may not have new content in every section on a regular basis.

And given that I’m just looking to fill the article area of the site, the sample layout/theme image I’ve worked up doesn’t include anything outside of that area except for a visual of the search box I’d like to use.

Here’s the mockup of what I’m hoping to achieve. Functionality described below should be viewed in terms of getting what’s pictured to work.

So, here goes:

1) The existing site search has a drop-down used to specify what area of the site is being searched (e.g., “Event Calendars”, “Movies”, etc.). I’d like to be able to add “Articles” or some other descriptor of WordPress content and have the search be performed on the WordPress archives for my site. Is it possible to call a search from a control like this?

2) Order of articles: Should be able to identify an order so that Top Story articles always appears in the left column above other types of articles, even if the other articles are newer.

3) Section-dependent formatting on the home page. For example, the Top Story font is larger than the font of other articles.

4) Only the first article in a section includes article text, with the rest of the articles displayed by post date and title only, under a “More [section name]:” heading.

5) Only articles from the most recent 7 days displayed; if no articles in a section are that recent, the whole section is removed from the front page (meaning content in that section would only be available by search or by archive browse.

6) Two columns of articles: A main left column and a narrower right column, with different formats — the narrow column format is somewhat more abbreviated (excludes author) and smaller. I’d be happy with either of these:
– define certain article types for the left column and others for the right column
– whatever section has the newest article is on top, and everything else is pushed down further in the left column based on age of most recent post, with the last N sections in the right column as the newest content in that section gets older. Caveat: Top Story should still always be on top.

7) Breadcrumb navigation on all pages beneath the main/front page, e.g., “Home > News” or something like that above an article in the News section.

8.) Some manageable way to prevent comment spamming; I recall reading a post from someone who has over 12,000 comments to moderate, presumably 98% spam with a few real folk lost in the shuffle…

Why no section buttons or links in the mockup? I don’t want to do a traditional series of buttons or tabs listing names of all article sections; that way if I don’t have any new articles in a particular section for an extended stretch, that section’s neglected existence won’t be highlighted.

So — is WordPress the right tool for the job? How much of this functionality is built in, and how much of it is going to require me (with only meager coding skills at best) to hire a developer?

Thanks,
J