A multitude of questions

Hi all... God, I hate it when someone new comes to a CMS's forum and blows the thing up with stupid questions..... Unfortunately I'm that guy today. I've been reading pages of documentation on Drupal, but I just can't seem to get everything just how I want it.

For starters, I have drupal 4.6 installed on a FreeBSD box with a MySQL database. Some of these features I would like to add may be already incorporated into drupal, some may need existing mods, and some may require new mods. I am looking for feedback, both specific and general on ways I can attempt to perform them.

Question one: I set up the stories module so that any registered user can post a story, BUT I don't want that story automatically posted to the front page-- I want it listed in the moderation queue so my moderators can review it before it goes live on the site. Am I missing an option button? I've searched all over the admin panel. (In my defense this backend has a steep learning curve.)

Question two: I want these news stories, all posted by visitors, to be specifically formatted. Ideally, I would like to format the submission form to contain specific variables which will be passed into a template for the post. I want the output to look like a newspaper article, with a lead image in the upper left corner set to a specific size range. Under the story title field I would like a "location" field where people type in the city the news story came from (so it can be displayed just like a newspaper does). Obviously I'll need an upload box for the image (preferably set to only accept jpg files). GD would them resize the image into a thumbnail with a specific width. I would also like an "Image description" field in the form, so when someone clicks on the thumbnail imbedded in the story it will open a new page showing the complete image with the image's description under it. I don't know if the existing story form can be edited to do this, or if I'll have to look at having another one designed.

Question three: I want a rating system for the articles. I see that there are already mods out there that can do this, so I am looking for a suggestion on what will be the best one to try. What I really want is a combination of the voting / userpoints / latest & greatest modules. I want people to be able to rate stories, and I want to use that data in combination with the number of page views to show the "Hottest Stories of the Week" on the side bar. Also, I want to use the userpoints module to work with this to find the "Submitter of the Week / Month / Year" buy calculating [(pageviews of all the user's posts) x (average rating) x (other points variables) = some comparable value]. I really hope that made some kind of sense.

Question four: The frontpage is set to display the ten most recent posts. Can I make a change to the template so mixed between the first post and the next nine is a block of random content? Furthermore, I would like to have the titles of posts #11-20 are listed on the right panel. I originally planned on modifying the RSS creator and including the parsed xml, but I think there is a simpler way.

I have spent the last month deciding what CMS to use for this site. Yesterday someone suggested Drupal, and I've been nothing but impressed with it so far. Excellent job to everyone that has had a part in the development of this script. Kudos.

Finally, I realize I am asking for a lot of info / help here. I am prepared to pay developers for their specific individual assistance on bringing this site to fruition. I hope that I can do most of this work myself, however I accept my limitations on both scripting and familiarity with this product.

Thanks to everyone in advance for their feedback, or just for reading my long drawn confusing description.