What should I do/who should I hire? re MT/WP, old style URLs, and database splitting

I need some advice on whether to upgarde to WP 2.1 or MT 3.2 and who to hire to do all the work for me. Here's my situation:

I want to update my old movable type 2.64 blogs to either MT 3.2 or Wordpress 2.1. Honestly I think I prefer Wordpress a little but I just want to do whichever one is easier. Or I should say whichever one I can hire someone to do for me more easily.

My biggest concerns are:

1. Right now I have 6 blogs sharing one database and someone will have to take the comments and posts for each blog and put them into a new database so that each blog has it's own databse after the update.

2. I need to keep the old style URLs (.com/archives/000555.html) or redirect old Movable Type URLs to new MT or WordPress URLs because many people have linked to the old URLs.

I don't know what .htaccess redirect rules will do to my SEO and link popularity. I know one person had to add encode_php="qq" and str_replace("_", "-", ...) in order to make URLs correct. I don't know what that means I jsut read it somewhere.

So what should I do (MT or wordpress), how should I handle the old urls, and who should I hire?

 

Sharing one database among six different blogs isn't something that I would worry too much about if things are going OK.

As for the old URLs, I think your best bet would be to implement mod_rewrite on your webserver with a 301 redirect to the new URLs.

Talking of choosing between MT or WP, I would say you take a look at mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/08/movable-type-32-impressions

Hope this helps...

 

Thank you for the help. I have considered leaving them all on the same database, but if I decide to sell one, this becomes something of a problem...