Taxonomy Blues - Should I stick Drupal out?

I've built about 3 small to medium scale Drupal sites. I tried Joomla in the past but, frankly, found their interface counter-intuitive.

I'm about to deploy a fairly large scale site that needs to serve a fairly large amount of content but I'm a bit nervous about the menu system and taxonomy.

In my previous installations I had been using the Category Module. It was perfect for the kind of auto-menuing I needed as well as the ability to actually write thing on the category and container pages as well as have the child and parent links appear automatically on the pages themselves.

The big problem, however, is that Category doesn't seem to be catching on to the core of the development and, as I've deployed more sites, I try to steer away from massive "module-ing" of the site.

Thus, I've been deploying the new site, am comfortable with the taxonomy I've established but now I feel stuck.

1. I can't seem to figure out an elegant way to menu the site. Taxonomy Menu doesn't seem to do the trick. It looks nice on the side but it doesn't link to the daughter menus on the page generated and the URL's are especially created by the module which goons up SEO.

2. I'm not sure if I'm going to figure out a good way to have users browse the taxonomies or see related content easily. If I allow free tagging then the menus created by taxonomy menu will get huge.

Well, I hate to sound like a heretic but I thought about Joomla again and tried a quick install of that product but it seems like that product is even thinner with respect to taxonomy support and what I'm trying to do.

I guess what I'm looking for here is "comfort". Am I wasting my time waiting for the functionality to arrive in Drupal for what I'm describing or is it asking too much for something like Categories to become more core? If it is wishful thinking, are there any other CMS's I could be looking at. I think I can make Drupal "work" for this large project but I'm nervous about getting in to this project and being stuck and having the site community upset because the taxonomy menuing becomes completely unmanageable and unuseful at a certain point.

Your thoughtful responses are appreciated.