textpattern, wordpress, & redesign

I'm re-doing one of my domains with textpattern or wordpress. I considered drupal, but to be honest, I want something with a little stronger 3rd party support. There are several features & functionalities missing in drupal which I need. For a site from scratch or one with content generated from within drupal, all is well. For those working with 3rd party apps already, well, it may or may not work (or even be available).

Drupal templating is also notoriously tough to work with, although with the new css zen template, it is easier to give it a look which is not straight out of the box. Drupal sites are generally u-g-l-y, but very functional! ;-)

Anyhow, I decided to try something new. I need:

• a blog - one with categories, subcategories, tagging, css templating, rss, upload images + the ability to import a rather large MT export file
• image gallery - preferably one that can import from coppermine or gallery with category support, metadata, rss, crossposting of images (assign images to more than 1 category)
  
• easy support for 3rd party scripting from flickr, youtube, blogger, other rss, etc.
  
• a way to generate 5 or 6 mostly static pages
• ability to template and design with css; slightly different templates for various sections
  
• valid coding would be nice, but I know there are sometimes compromises

On this domain, I have been using expression engine (ee) for years for a blog software. However, I am now ready to dump ee, due to its cost and licensing restrictions. Actually, I started out with greymatter (opensource) then migrated to MT (movable type) and then migrated to ee. So, some of my data has already been through 3 migrations.

I know wordpress can do this. Textpattern seems to be an option too. So, an interesting experiment.