Best practices for event registration?

I am converting a WordPress site to Drupal and we currently have an event registration form where you can signup / RSVP for an event. Anyone can go to the form and signup, you don't need to get invited or register on the site. I have looked at the Drupal Signup and CCK Signup modules but neither seems to do exactly what I need. With Signup, it seemed difficult to add custom fields and with CCK Signup, there was some question as to whether or not anonymous users could signup but documentation is lacking for the latter.

To us the key is that we do not want to force people to register on the site in order to signup for an event, we want the easiest path possible to signup which means going the anonymous route. I also considered webform but in the end that was not good becuase it's imperative that all this data be available in Views and webform does not allow data to be available in views.

So I decided to theme a node form with CCK fields, get rid of the body (i.e. delete the label in editing the content type so it does not show up on the node form), add captcha as well as using the Automatic title generation module. To the end user it looks like a standard webform. My only concerns with doing it this way are:

1) A user could theoretically signup for the same event more than once. -- With our current system the user's email is checked when they submit the form to see if it's already in the database. The issue here is if we somehow did that with the CCK email field we are using than the user would not be able to signup for future events as the CCK data is in one big table. With our current system, each event is in a separate MYSQL table.

2) The other issue is that thousands of nodes will be created just for signups over time though I am aware that Drupal can handle a lot of nodes. At any rate these nodes will be excluded from site search and indexing so it's not a major concern and we are going to use adminstrtive Views of content so we can exclude our custom RSVP / Signup content type from the content list. Note I am also using Rules to send out an autoreply to the person filling out the form, e.g. "Thanks for RSVP'ing, here is some detailed event info etc..."

I have attached a screen capture of my themed node form just to give a glimpse of where I am at so far. I am looking for feedback to see if I am on the right track or if there is perhaps some other way to do this that's better or something I am missing. cheers and thanks, Danny Englander