What're you crazy!? Haven't you ever heard of the CCK module? Yes, it's true CCK coupled with views will allow one to create, manipulate and display custom content. Combined with hook_nodeapi, the cck/views combo is can be extremely powerful and flexible. 99% of the time these two modules are sufficient to handle the job of building and managing custom content. The problem arises when you need any sort of custom access control or ownership of your custom node content. With CCK, the ownership of the node belongs to node.module, and there's no 'access' operator exposed in hook_nodeapi. You could patch core ( http://drupal.org/node/143075 ), but in general, that's not really a road you want to start down.
