I totally agree – WordPress is absolutely the way forward. There are some great developers with some amazing themes that work with all the major functions that WordPress can offer. My site is built (albeit modified heavily) from a template and does me very well. You’re spot on about the Page Speed issue though; WP can be heavy on calling PHP functions so a caching plugin can help enormously along with standard Gzip or Zlib compression at the server end.
Love the site you’ve put togwther too – very engaging and informative, thanks very much!