To be fair, I had found a theme plug-in that was a template which could be used to create your own theme. I knew that I could do it, but also knew that it was going to take time. For the photo gallery, I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, but knew that it was a combination of my old photo gallery (which didn’t run on the current Plone) and two other gallery plug-ins I had found.
I was dishearted because I knew that to find a solution to the data issue was going to take even more time; time I didn’t really want to spend. The theme was going to take time, the photo gallery was going to take a lot more, but this data problem could be the grand-daddy of all timesinks. I weighed a lot of factors in my decision: from the cost of hosting, to the flexibility in changing user interface, available themes, etc.
The decision to switch to an application running on my desktop means that I can no longer edit my site anywhere in the world using a web browser, but I really never did anyway. And, because the sites created by RapidWeaver are static and not dynamic, I can put them just about anywhere, including a server residing at home.
I think that Zope and Plone are amazing pieces of software, but together they comprise a full content management system and they were overkill to run my small web site.