Still Figuring Out Drupal Taxonomy

I'm still trying to figure out how exactly to structure the taxonomy/categories of this site. I have the tagadelic and taxonomy_dhtml modules and I am playing around with them a bit. Drupal is fairly robust when it comes to categorization and I'd like to just go with something and get it right the first time. Right now I'm leaning towards flat-hierarchy free-tagging for the "stories" (blog articles) with a tag cloud or alphabetized list on the right hand side, along with archival listings. And static pages using multi-level categories with a collapsable menu. Drupal is just so damn configurable, that's the trouble and there are so many modules and different ways of doing things.