Template Design

Lovely user group,

In front of me, I have stacks of pages of wireframes I'm supposed to be putting to work in a NetSuite store.  In the last few weeks, I've been wrestling with Advanced Customization in an attempt to fit our ideas for user interface into the built-in template system.  As part of this process, I'm hitting brick walls in the template design, then too often I go check the user group only to find the words "not possible."

From what I've seen of Advanced Customization, it's not what I want to use.  I need every element on the page to be hand-made (i.e. pagination tools on item lists).  I need to be able to parse conditionals that apparently don't exist any more (i.e. "if (isFeaturedItem()) { showFeaturedItemIcon(); }").  I need more advanced navigation in my sidebars (multivariable winnowing, not just categories).  I need to arrange the general layout of the site by hand, preferably without 2^16 levels of nested tables.  What I'm looking for is a blank sheet of paper with true server-side programming/scripting and fast access to