Hi Pete and welcome to the forum. Like you I sat around for years worrying about what to use and how but once I finally bit the bullet and got started it turned out a lot easier than expected. Basically most of my decisions were made for me, either by price or simply by looking at what people had done. In fact its the little things that are causing most of the delays rather than thing like motors, controlers etc.
DNN makes things nice and easy, my other sites are completely hand made but they require full programming and database etc. I didn't have the time to go to that level with this site but as a result I think it has turned out better than expected.