Is modx right for me?

Hey all,
I have an application to build and I don’t really want to start from scratch. I have been looking around and multiple cms systems that will give me the flexibility I am looking for. From what I have read, modx seems promising. I am leery of the over customization possibilities & of course the learning curve.
Here is what I have:
An community athletics application. It will include multiple schools, sports for those schools, teams for those sports,players for those teams, stats/images/videos/etc for players, schedules, stats, polls. Press Releases on games, photos/videos for games/teams, blogs, forums. Community members (such as soccer moms) can add photos/videos of games or teams, comment on press releases, write their own story about the game on a forum.

As you can see I need a lot of flexibility. The site will be very hierarchical.

Also, what would you say on average the learning curve is to get up and running with the ability to use the system as more of a framework than a simple cms?
Hope I was clear enough in my expectations. Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks!

Most of what you need is fairly straightforward and a good fit with MODx. The two exceptions are the blogs and forums. People do very nice blogs and forums in MODx, but there’s no simple out-of-the-box solution for them.

WordPress is a very good blog platform, but trying to meet your other requirements in it would be a real challenge. It would make me crazy. Similarly, SMF will solve your forum problems but nothing else. Drupal has a lot of nice add-on solutions, but it makes you do things the "Drupal" way and it, too, would make me crazy.

In your situation, especially if the blogs and forums don’t need to have a lot of bells and whistles, I would use MODx for the site and do custom stuff for the blogs and forums. It the blogs and forums need the bells and whistles, I’d still use MODx and link to SMF and Wordpress installs for them.

How long it takes to get up to speed is hard to estimate because it depends on your skills and your previous experiences with CMS platforms.

Take a look a the page link in my sig. If it all makes sense to you, more or less, it won’t take long to get up to speed with MODx. If it looks like Greek, it will take a little longer.