Good morning.
We are in the process of 'blueskying' a niche industry 'yellow pages' - style directory webring. Our first venture will be three related websites offering listings for three areas of a single industry, with practicioners in the retail, service, and supply side of this industry to be represented.
We have looked at PHPMyDirectory, and it has a number of positive attributes. However, it is not diverse enough to meet all our (at this point theoretical) needs.. and we are certain that Drupal would be. However, we have been unable at this point to find a 'directory' module, per se, so are coming here in hopes of gaining some interest.
At it's most basic, the solution would have 3-5 levels of subscription, ranging from free to premium, with increasing levels of service at higher levels (completely conventional) At the highest levels, however, we would allow content creation outside the actual 'customer record'... news, blog, contribute to the "book". Not a bonafide admin position, but certainly an über-subsriber.