Small Slide Show on top right of story nodes

I have another question for all you Drupal news site vets out there. We are in the process of setting up a new news site using Drupal. I am a programmer but I am new to Drupal. I am trying to avoid coding my own PHP as much as possible to make things easier to use and update for other non-programmer types in the company.

We want to create sports story nodes that will have a section at the top right that will hold an image box with 4 to 6 thumbnails below it. If there are more than 4 to 6 images associated with the story the thumbnails need to page or rotate to allow more thumbs. Clicking on a thumb should display that image in the image box above. Clicking on the image in the image box should produce a pop-up (like light box) that shows a pop-up enlarged version of the photo. There has also been mention of how nice it would be if we could have videos in the mix as well.

I would like our sports writers to be able to easily bulk upload a set of images for a story and attach them to their text copy and then have Drupal handle the rest of the page generation behind the scenes.

I know we can do this with Drupal. I also suspect we can do it without any custom PHP on my part. I am just having a hard time wading through all the possible options available out there for images. Does anyone have any pointers or Module recipes they could offer to help me out?

What I have looked at so far...

Front Page Slide Show: Seems to be too 'un-drupalish' and requires too much manual futzing to be of use to my sports writers. Our slide shows need to be created dynamically and automatically on the fly on a story by story basis.

SimpleViewer: I like this option because it is flash based and the PRO version includes the source FLA and Action Script to make the front end work. I am good with modifying Flash and action script and could really tweak the front end into our own look and feel.

Galleria: Seems to be a good front end but it would be harder for me to work with the look and feel of that interface.

It seems to me that you could use CCK, Taxonomy, and Views to make the "image to story" associations and then feed the proper images over into a front end like SimpleViewer or Galleria. Am I reading things right here?

I am just feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the pieces to this puzzle and thought it might be time for an expert opinion or two.

Thanks a bunch!

BTW: I have our paid subscription service running on a sandbox now. To solve our password sharing problem we have it setup so the user never gets a password to share. All logins are handled with cookies and cookies are established via one time login links sent to the registered email address. If any one wants more details on that let me know. It seems to be working great in beta testing so far.

Dano