Should I use Drupal?

I’m pretty good with HTML and CSS, and my PHP is coming along. I created a site (localhost, not on line yet) that consists of static pages. It’s set up like a book, where the content doesn’t change. Everything was going well until I decided to add comments so I would be able to receive feedback. If the site becomes popular, I would want to add a forum too. Realizing the potential for spam and intrusion attacks with email, comments, and forums – I decided to look into CMS. I spent some time with Wordpress, but it isn’t versatile enough to handle my site’s many different page structures. I’m starting to think the same is true of Drupal.

Time magazine, for example, has many different page types. It has the cover, an index, different article formats, full page adds, etc – many different page formats. My site is something like that. Its different pages are easy to code with a combination of HTML and CSS, but I’m finding it’s difficult to do the same with Drupal. For example, I don’t want a header, footer, or index on every page, but I want them on some. I would probably need about 30 different themes to make my site look exactly the way I want. I’m also having trouble doing extremely simple things like adding tables, not for the page structure (I use divs), but instead, just inserting a simple table that looks like a few cells from a spreadsheet. I enabled Full HTML in the input format section under content administer, but still cannot code tables.

However, that’s not my question. I bought Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk and Westgate. The first sentence of Chapter-6 reads “Users are the reason for using Drupal.” Oh no! My site isn’t about users adding content. It’s like a versatile 300-page textbook, with links, audio, video, different page structures, etc. I’ll tweak and improve the content occasionally, but except for allowing comments, the whole site is static.

My question is – should I be using Drupal? I love the way it handles comments and it’s easier to edit content than when done with HTML. It has many modules I’m sure I’ll use someday, but designing pages by editing themes is more difficult and less versatile than when done with CSS alone. I got one page to look exactly as I wanted by commenting out most of a theme’s features in the PHP files, then changing the theme’s CSS. The whole process seemed sloppy. It took a long time and there wasn’t much left of the original theme by the time I finished. It seems that Drupal has too much overhead for what I’m trying to do – static pages, some with comments. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?