Domain access and modules

Hi,

I'm testing the waters of domain access and I'm not sure if I should use it for my new site. Basically, we have a large, main site and are rebuilding a second site we have in Drupal. The reason for considering domain access is that we want unified user accounts between the two sites, and we want blog posts on the second site to be visible on the main site (especially in views).

Something I'm concerned about, and I'm comparing Domain Access to Drupal's multi-site capabilities here, is that modules are global. There is no way to have modules enabled on one site but not the other. Is that correct? Doesn't that mean (especially on Drupal 5) that our second site, even if it is 'lighter' in functionality than our main site, will have the overhead of all the modules that we use on the first site?

So is it that Domain Access is more suited when there is a multi-site array where the sites' functionalities are fairly similar? Or where there is a mass of sites that are more related than our sites are in my use case? I'm debating whether Domain Access is better suited here or if I should use Drupal's multi-site features and share users, sequence, and certain content database tables.

Another side-question I have has to do with promoting items to front. It looks like If I set my front page to 'node' (the default) on a second domain, I get all the nodes promoted to front on my main domain. Is there a way to have a separate 'front' for promotion for content from the secondary domain?

Thanks for any advice on this.