I'd say your best bet is to check out some of the high quality themes at http://themeforest.net -- if you don't want to deal with html / css the wordpress themes are really easy to setup and look amazing.
I don't know enough to evaluate any of these claims or worries; do you think that they're still true? I certainly absolutely positively have no problem paying for a high quality theme, I'm much more worried about creating a mess on my server that will take dozens of hours of attention to clean up.
1. Buy theme from themeforest or similar. 2. Buy a shared hosting account from webfaction or similar (less than $10/month) 3. Use their one-click Wordpress installer to install Wordpress 4. Install theme in Wordpress install.
This keeps it off your server in case of issue, doesn't really cost much at all, and offers some great hosting support if you run into issues (http://docs.webfaction.com/software/wordpress/index.html) that's current.
Don't sweat it. And webfaction (or other shared host) allows you to run something else if you need it, like a simple PHP (or something else) app
There are a ton of websites built on WP (https://wordpress.org/showcase/), so it's not just a blogging-only platform.
For what you're trying to do, I'd definitely bet on a hosted CMS + a nice theme. You'll get a pretty website that's easy to manage, and it will cost very little in terms of time and money.