Hi there!
I have a very similar “problem” although my requirements are significantly lower.
There is a hobby at my end – I have a model railroad collection. Sofar my collection is presented in a 13 years old pure HTML page. Now I think, it’s time to do a complete redraw of my page and significantly improve it on the basis of a CMS. But how can this be achieved without a lot of programming jobs to do? My thought was: my collection could be presented in a webshop application without the selling feature (I’m collecting, I’m not selling one single piece). The principle is very similar, it’s a product presentation based on a number of criterias.
My good friend “John the frog” recommended woocommerce as a webshop solution on WordPress. This looks very promising for me. I’m convinced we can cover the requirements almost without problems.
What do you think about our approach?