drupal for information repository?

Hi, I'm trying to design a site based around some basic principles and I'm not sure if drupal is right for me or not.

Basically my site will be first and foremost an information repository/database and a user community secondary. Because of the user community part I'm looking at various CMS platforms, but they seem to be tailored more around publishing somewhat free-form content rather than strict, structured data.

My site will have a database of car information. I want there to be a page for all kinds of cars. The specific criteria will be something like this:

Type
Make
Model
Year
Body style
# of doors

I'd want the above to be searchable and browseable. For example, a user could search for vehicles with Type "Car" and Make/Model parent "Ford", child "Mustang", and Years between 1965-1972. Or, the user could browse to Ford, then Mustang, and get a list of all cars in the Mustang hierarchy for which there is any data.

In each individual car page I'd also want:

A table of consistent information for every car, like "number produced" and "engines available".
An image gallery of pictures of that specific car, if any exist.
User comments

Lastly, I'd love people to be able to edit the information, sort of wiki-style. For instance if someone goes to the 1968 Ford Mustang convertible page and they see there is no data for "number produced", they can add this information. The site would log this revision and allow rollback + show revision history. I know I need 4.7 for revision support.

The main thing I'm confused about so far is whether to structure the site based around heavy use of taxonomy or instead use custom fields in the flexinode module.

I created a taxonomy with top-level categories like "body style", "doors", and "make/model". I'm not sure how to handle years though. Do I pre-populate this with all possible years? That doesn't jive very well with the search pages. I don't want the user to get a massive dropdown of 100 different years. Also the "make/model" hierarchy is going to be very large. The dropdown will be much too big for a module like taxonomy_browser.

I guess taxonomy makes sense if there was a smarter search page dealing with taxonomy hierarchies. For instance I might have 500 total items in my "make/model" taxonomy. Instead of listing all 500 I'd love something that listed the 25 or so top-level items, then created a second dropdown selection based on children of the selected top-level item. Does that make sense?

I suppose much of this will have to be pretty customized but I thought I'd try to get some ideas.