If you want to build something nice, try starting with modx and get building with that. Wordpress is good for blogs and that is about it. It was not designed as a multi-media content script. The slashdot/digg effect blows crappy blogs on crappy servers away, so a popular site running wordpress based on collage humor/ any big media site, will need a server farm x10 lol. (note modx is a more a framework then CMS, but it does do a simple type blog "out of the box" so to speak.)
I know of a wordpress blog which gets 600,000 page views per day with one web server and one database server.