I had a situation where I wanted individual nodes within a view to appear different from one another. (e.g. add additional spacing at specific places in a grid view, color code the grid for easy scanning, etc) To accomplish this, I tagged each node with a series of taxonomy terms associated with various traits.
Recently I developed a site for viewing switch maps. Basically, each switch was it's own node, each module within the switch was it's own node, and each individual port within each module was it's own node - all linked using node reference fields.
Modules that have a guaranteed Drupal 7 release (or upgrade path):
CCK
Date
External Link
Filefield
Fivestar
Google Analytics
ImageAPI - now in core
Imagecache - now in core
Imagefield
IMCE
JQuery UI
Lightbox2
Link
Markdown
Path Redirect
Rules
String Overrides
Token - now in core
User Protect
Views
VotingAPI
Webform