Simple.   I have done the exact function as above with the Articles Module from Ventrian Systems.   It will put arms on your giant that will make it fly, and it will show some teeth too.     Yes, it includes date ranges, feature settings, comments, ratings, visits or clicks and more.   It even has easy to update template function, so you can adjust what is displayed where.

Give DNN a chance.  What ever you are comparing too, no system will be identical to the next, but the functionality you are looking for can be obtained in DNN.

DNN is pretty good as far as open source CMS.  Plone, Rainbow, and Joomla are also not bad though.

The only complaint I've ever hear about DNN, is that it's infact, overkill on some projects.  With that said, I do like how in DNN 4.x, the host can choose which modules to install.  That's a nice add-on, I must say. 

The best modules are, in order, the following:  Blogs, Chat (3rd party), Forums, Store/E-Commerce (again, some 3rd party ones are better than the default DNN comes with), Wiki, and Feed Aggregator. 

Does anyone know where to get a good spell checker?

Vic,

You can simply install this http://www.iespell.com/ and it will work with the FCK Editor albeit it works only on IE.

Hope this helps.