Before you start

I have been planning to open up a new website for my company and hence i have gone through a number of CMS's like the Joomla , Wordpress etc. But i found that Drupal is the best. I have tried the Joomla too are there any software available for drupal like XAMPP which is quiet handy while using Joomla.

I'm looking to start a site where the main focus is each individual's profile, with a frontpage showcasing some news and featured profiles. I'm wondering if it's possible for each profile to have the option to start its own miniblog, and if drupal is the best way to accomplish this.

Alright, so I have been reading the cookbook and decided the best way to find out whether Drupal can accomplish what I'm looking for is by asking. So,

I aim to build a very crowdsourced site where users can upload their own content, and based on a few things like the content's rating, pageviews, etc., the user can earn money, kinda like on Youtube. UberCart and some of the e-commerce stuff seems to do this, but I'm not quite sure.

I am a web developer and have downloaded software quite a bit, so I don't know why this is so difficult, but I can not seem to get the basic files of drupal downloaded correctly. I am using firefox. I click "save" when the box pops up after clicking download. It downloads as a tar.gz file. It is about 1mb. I try to unzip the file, but there is nothing but that one file and it tries to open up in Word. Any suggestions/help would be appreciated!

I've been trying to find some reference on Drupal best practices, but with not much success. These are things that interest me the most:

1) How should look like architecture of a complex site? In most of examples that I found in books and on the internet all coding is inside template files which I don't prefer. Should there be, for example, a separate layer that will contain business logic as well as node manipulation and so on?

2) In which cases I should build modules? When to use blocks?

I need a little complex web application. Because I need also a good handling with user accounts, I was thinking maybe it can be developed with drupal.

I hope I could get some thoughts on how this module might be developed.