CCK and Views vs. Plugin and the way Nodes work

Hi there,

what I'm trying to implement using Drupal 6 is a diary-like web application that allows users to store a set of information of what they did on a certain day.

However, I'm quite unsure about the way to accomplish this (cck and views vs. plugin(s) vs. a combination of them and the way nodes work).

While this is similar to the "How to track volunteer hours" at http://drupal.org/node/264041, it's different in a few important points:

1. I want the user to create an entry for a certain day and then add 'activities' for that day. Since there might be quite a lot of activities (say a dozen) this should be something like an AJAX table... preferably one I don't have to implement manually...

   From the db standpoint, this also means I have two tables with a simple 1:n relation. What bothers me, however, is whether each 'day entry' and each 'activity entry' is supposed to be a node or not.

2. Users can create new activities, but they are globally available to all users and thus have to be verified and activated by administrators. Is there an elegant way to implement this?

I have the feeling that CCK and Views can do all this (using some noderef-magic?), but it seems to me that a node for each small piece of information like this is overkill. Or is this just a misconception?

Any help is greatly appreciated!
Chris