some features I miss and think are important...

Drupal's book.module offers the ability to create a hierarchy of nodes (static pages, forum pages, story pages...) on the fly. Note this is different than the categories in the taxonomy. Maybe what you want is a feature for the administrator to apply a taxonomy to published nodes. Implemented, administers might see a node link "categorize this", which when clicked presents the post along with the taxonomy selection form. This would certainly be cool.

Regarding ranking options, drupal doesn't yet have many options. I've written about one ranking approach on drop.org and hope to see it implemented someday. It might also be possible to use the weighting feature in the block module and apply it to posts. This could be implemented with yet another admin (or role enabled) link for each node. Clicking this shows the node and a pull down to select the relative ranking.

If someone decides this is worth developing, I'd recommend some thought on usability around weighting. User's will want to specify where a node falls relative to other ranked nodes.

Finally, I also see a need for people to write a teaser that is different from the beginning of the article. Maybe there should be a poll here to gauge how big of an issue this is.