Some comments ...

Having looked at your site, I don't think that having spent "5-figures" is excessive.  There is a lot going on there.  I'm sorry, though, that your site doesn't meet your expectations.

You mention that you cannot afford to spend $50/hour or more for work on the site.  I don't think that this will come as a surprise, but this will limit what you can do.  The going rate for website design and development, at least in the US, is in excess of $50/hr.

I think that what you need at this point is to take a good look at your site, determine what it should do, and identify what is missing, what is done badly, etc.  Before talking to anyone about reworking your site, you need to have a very specific set of ideas as to what is needed.

As for your specific comments:

I happen to think that Enjage Publish is one of the best tools for content management.  Is it Publish that's causing problems, or is it that Publish is being used badly.  There is a difference.

You mention that your skins are "buggy."  It may be that fixing your skins will be a good first step.

I also like Active Forums.  Their new Active Social product might also be useful to you in building an active community in your site.  You might also want to take a look at the UserProfile, UserGroups, and other products from SmartThinker.

What are you using now for your calendar?  Off the top of my head, managing 1000+ events per month would seem to be quite a task.  Besides the DotNetNuke module, you might also take a look at Engage's Events module.  It's new, and I really haven't used it, but it's probably worth a look.

For e-commerce, I think that ASPDotNetStorefront/DNN is perhaps the "state of the art."  That recommendation comes from what I read, not personal experience.  Look also at Catalook.

None of these additions will be inexpensive.  I'll repeat my first bit of advice:  figure out what you need, what you want.  Also, your budget is going to determine what you really are able to do.

If you want to contact me privately for more detailed discussions, I'd be happy to do that, and also try to put you in contact with people who might be available to help you.

Joe,

Thanks for your response. You're right, the price wasn't unreasonable if it worked right and did what it was supposed to.

Engage Publish is very good. We're waiting for an upgrade that will give us the flexibility to control the display order of articles, but otherwise no complaints.

I agree, fixing the skins is our first step. They have been fixed to a degree, but there are still problems. One strange one all of a sudden is that Horiz and Vert scroll bars at the right and bottom of the page are now appearing on a lot of our pages--but only in IE, not Firefox or Chrome. Strange things pop up from time to time seemingly out of nowhere.

You're right: managing that many events could be tough. There are hundreds if not thousands of booksignings alone every week in the US and our readers would like to know about them. Our calendar is prerelease version of Engage Events. Invenmanager's Events Calendar and Registration 2.2.7 seems to be powerful and popular. And thanks for the link to SmartThinker. They have an interesting calendar, too. One of things we're looking for is the ability for people to look for events by radius (100 miles from NYC), but no one offers that yet.

Yes, ASPDotNetStorefront is powerful software--we use it for another business--and we imagine the DNN version is excellent. Our vendor installed CataLook for its subscription managment abilities, but it hasn't been set up yet. They offer an install/configure package for $500 that we're seriously considering.

I don't mean to sound cheap, but we're in publishing and it's a very tough market these days (even more than most businesses) and budgets have been slashed. I'd like for us to attain the skills to handle as much as reasonable in house and then find people we can use as needed where it makes sense to outsource. But the goal is to hire a FT webmaster in 6 months as we adjust to this "new economy."

Thanks--I will contact you privately as well.