How to combine nodes / extend modules?

Hi there,

I've been reading through CCK and Views documentation trying to figure out how to do this, but am no longer sure if either of those modules are the right way to approach this issue:

I have a module that displays some form of data, and now I would like to extend that module with a couple of additional features (a small user-uploadable image gallery per node, "node membership" i.e. members signing-up to a node, a unique photo per node (provided by the node creator) ).

For all of those things I could simply extend the module to include these things, but I'm fairly sure that there should be a more elegant solution to this. I came quite close to achieving what I was looking for with CCK, but only managed to user nodereference fields, and using that method a user would have to create a photo, then an image gallery, then his special node and finally a CCK node to reference to the other three nodes ...?

Could anyone please explain to me how to do this more elegantly, i.e. only be presented with one form combining all forms of the nodes in question and then ideally only creating one node rather than three unique nodes and a fourth one referencing to the other three?

Thanks!