You're not crazy, but it might be overkill for what you're ultimatley trying to do.
On this site Josh developed a special page for mods that lets you click on a button to get all the mods for Threads 6.2 (for example), and to search the mods. He was kind enough to give me a copy of the php script and template that he used to make that page, and I'm going to hack it to develope an "article index" for my site. When I'm finished I'll release it as a mod that anyone can use on their own site. It's gonna be a while before I can get to it though cause I'm knee deep in developing a template set for Threads 6.3.
As for asigning people to write columns: Just create groups for your authors, give write permissions to those groups in the forums you want them to post in, and asign authors to the groups. Then if someone wants to write a colomn they can post it in whatever article forum you've given them permission to post in (you can even set up post moderation in those forums).
I'm hesitant to do any article development in TLD because it's not finished yet.
