New to Radiant and confused

I’ve done a little bit with Radiant but I haven’t done much digging into
the
more complex functionality. I’m a bit confused about something though.

Looking at things like the Blog demo, is the answer to really create
each post
as a child? Isn’t this going to be unwieldy when a blog has say, 3000
posts on
it?

The site I’m working on (for my High School class) is going to have a
News area
with stories posted occasionally, in similar fashion to the blog demo.
I would
somewhat prefer a more simple method of adding the stories to a table,
but then
it seems I would lose the ability to iterate through them as children
and such.

The same idea applies with the lists of people-- I don’t think having
500 child
pages, one for each person, is logical, but I’m missing the correct way
to do
this, I think.

What I feel like I’m after is something that would let me iterate
through a
table (with a parameter attached to filter the options), and then
display each
item in a certain way, without creating a billion child pages.

Any information would be appreciated, and I apologize if this is a
completely
stupid question.

Thanks,
–Mike

You may not be up to the task but I wrote a Directory and News
extension which provides a management system like you described,
tabular and paginated. I then incorporate the material into sites
using the custom radius tags I wrote for the extension. Maybe Sean or
someone else who runs a blog can describe how they maintain sanity as
the number of posts grows.

-James