Ive ended up using drupal.
I did spend quite a while installing and trying different things in joomla wordpress and drupal. I found Wordpress easiest to use even though Ive never used it before, followed by Joomla, and then Drupal lagging waaaaaaaay behind in terms of beginner friendlyness.
The problem is that Wordpress I found was a bit limited, what was available was incorporated/installed seamlessly and excellently, but just wasnt what i was after, producing a rather chaotic site structure.
Joomla I wanted to use as I am used to the admin and know my way around it fairly well, but it seriously lacks taxonomic structuring of content. From what I could gather there are only a couple of commercial modules available and I wasnt going to pay £50-£80 for them. The new version of joomla that is in the works from what i can gather will use it.
Which left me with Drupal, which is pretty much marketed on the fact it uses taxonomy, albeit in a slightly different way from what Im used to. The admin is totalyl different from what im used to so its a bit of a chore, but Im slowly getting to grips with it.
I just know though that Ill get so far and then discover I could have done something differently and made life much easier.
The site is currently here:
http://www.muddy-boots.net/micro/ but Ive only got one thing on there to test out the taxonomy, it needs tweaking. Ideally I want to end up with something similar to this site, which also uses drupal I gather:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740 - I want to use the same kind of structure for content but probably skip all the community stuff. Im tempted to email them and ask if they can offer any suggestions/support on how to go about mirroring their structure somewhat for something that is similar to what they are doing but much more specialised...