Okay gurus,

I'm looking for suggestions regarding the best way to go about building a relational research database in 4.6. My relationships will be as follows:

Many research authors working for many research organizations
Many research authors producing many research reports.
Many research reports on many research topics, including peer reviews of many research organizations.

I've started working with civicrm to manage organizational and individual contact information. However, as far as I know, civicrm currently has limited ability to interact with other modules. (Ideally, I could create a flexinode for 'research reports' that could link to authors in the civicrm database.)

I've also tried tagnode, but the many-to-many relationships get confusing, and it's hard to show the direction of these relationships (ie, is the organization the subject or producer of a report). Now, if a node type could generate terms in multiple vocabularies, then maybe it would work...

CCK might be an option, but I need to stay on 4.6 b/c of other modules I'm using.

The Relationship (Node linking and Metadata) module ultimately looks like my best option - but it doesn't seem to be ready for live sites (to say nothing about the challenges of creating new relationship ontologies - no offense, Dan, but I'm a newbie and can't make it work).

I guess that I could build the db custom - but I want this system to be able to grow as Drupal develops.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Cheers,
Sean