How to create Editions/Issues for a printed daily newspaper?

Hello newspaper experts,

I need your advice...

I've been asked to create a website for a daily printed newspaper in a small country. The budget is tiny, so I'm doing this out of sympathy. I jumped at the project only to save them from the madness of doing it through Wordpress. After all, Drupal proves it's power as the King of CMS precisely through the newspaper sites. But now I'm stuck with a seemingly simple problem:

What is the most optimal and user-friendly way to create daily Editions (Issues) which contain 15-20 articles of that day?

The newspaper has been printing since 1990s, so they have nearly 3000 daily issues/editions and tens of thousands of articles, but I want to come up with a SIMPLE and minimalist website with easy navigation and fast access to desired content. Next day's articles will be submitted either by the authors directly or by webmasters (under author's name), but those articles will not be visible to public untill the new Edition does not go live 4am next morning. I need the easiest solution for their webmasters to easily and quicly compile the next day's editions. Also the past editions need to be automatically sorted and easily accessed through some sort of calendar-based archive. I think this question of how to bind articles into "Editions" is the most important question when thinking of creating a website for a printed newspaper through Drupal. These are the options that I came up with so far:

1) One of the ways to do this is as in the write-up about Observer.com , and the way that they created a CCK content type called "Edition" with node-references to various articles. But my main concern is Speed! The site needs to be very fast.
2) Using Innovation News module, but I can't figure out how the anonymous readers are supposed to see and read Editions. Yes, admins can sort articles into editions, but there is no way to display those editions to anonymous readers.
3) Using E-Publish module, but it seems to be fixed and not flexible about the various things that one would want to do with editions.
4) Using the core Taxonomy module, though I can't see how that could be a "good" solution in terms of sorting the articles and making a good daily front page.

What would be your advice? What in your experience is the solution that is optimal, easiest to create, easiest to use by the webmasters, flexible about how editions can be displayed in archives, fast in terms of front and back-end performance and generally intuitive content navigation for the readers???

Thanks in advance for your advices.