I have an FAQ up on my blog.

It gives some of the story behind the news, and delves into the anatomy and implications for hominin origins. I'll be updating it as the day goes on to add more information.

You can move modules from one column to another to another to the footer. You can plug in any of a large variety of different modules and have them do exactly what they were designed for. You can make the blue bits a different color and up font sizes on your headers with awesome power.

It's pretty easy to edit the CSS in the theme files and achieve whatever custom look you want. If you can do it on a static web page, you can get Drupal to output it. I'm in the process of converting a static website to Drupal, and I've had no problem replicating the look and feel of the current static page precisely.

Now, if you're starting out without knowing any CSS or unwilling to customize a theme from the source, you are always going to be limited to the themes and options that someone else is kind enough to provide. But aside from there being more potential themes for some CMS engines (like Wordpress), I've not experienced any drawbacks in Drupal from the standpoint of page design.