I haven't slogged through all of the comments here; however, having worked with both Drupal and the current 3.3 release of eFiction (http://www.efiction.org), I've gotta say that a fiction and art archive, Drupal ain't. Not by a long shot.
Frankly, I'd say that the best bet if you wanted to use Drupal overall would be to bridge the two or to take the current eFiction release and customize it for integration as a Drupal module. eFiction *already* supports round robins, for example. It supports admin-defined classifications, whether they be genre or pairing or whatever. It has some RSS support already and more specific feeds could certainly be added. It uses the Smarty Template system, which *can* also be used by Drupal, at least in theory (I haven't tried this myself). eFiction's image support is not great but I commissioned a Coppermine Gallery bridge a while back and the two can be integrated pretty darn well, thus drastically improving overall capability.
Drupal's image galleries suck. Big time. The Acidfree Album module is currently the nicest and simplest option that I've found for using images in Drupal but it's far from perfect. If you're going to archive fanart, you need something more like Coppermine. Once again, you could bridge the two or write a module to integrate Coppermine into Drupal, but I really don't think that any existing Drupal modules are up to the task.
I've also been told that Drupal's built-in forums aren't very powerful for large sites. They're fine for the site that I'm running in RL since it's a small non-profit club that probably will never have more than a handful of active topics and a dozen or so forums at most, but they're apparently not that great for a truly large site with many forums and active threads.
In addition to eFiction bridged with Coppermine, another option for the archive side of things would be Fabulister (http://www.fabulister.com), the script powering Lexicon (http://www.transformersfanfic.com), the massive Transformers fanfic and fanart archive. The script was commissioned by Charlotte Brogden, the archive's maintainer, specifically for fanfic and fan art. It's GPL but I'm not sure if the source code has ever actually been publicly posted, though I'm sure that Charl would be happy to make it available to this project.
Even if you're not interested in Fabulister, you may want to take a gander at the original 13-page feature list (http://www.fabulister.com/index.php?cat=11) that it was designed and built from. That may be of use in determining features for the new archive.
I'm not saying that Drupal shouldn't be part of the picture - but I don't think that it's the whole picture. It may make a good frame for the site as a whole, but I really don't think that it's a good choice for the fic and art archive and I can't see the point of designing a new module from scratch for that purpose. Why re-invent the wheel when there's several perfectly good wheels out there that can be modded to fit the need?
One other sidenote: regardless of the backend software used, you'll probably want to look into some sort of import script to pull in fic from existing archives such as the various eFiction and Automated Archive versions. Generally speaking, when people get out of the fan archive hobby, they don't have the time and/or interest to manually transfer the whole thing to a new system; you're going to need a quick-and-easy method to pull the stories and art over or it's not going to happen.
no subject
Frankly, I'd say that the best bet if you wanted to use Drupal overall would be to bridge the two or to take the current eFiction release and customize it for integration as a Drupal module. eFiction *already* supports round robins, for example. It supports admin-defined classifications, whether they be genre or pairing or whatever. It has some RSS support already and more specific feeds could certainly be added. It uses the Smarty Template system, which *can* also be used by Drupal, at least in theory (I haven't tried this myself). eFiction's image support is not great but I commissioned a Coppermine Gallery bridge a while back and the two can be integrated pretty darn well, thus drastically improving overall capability.
Drupal's image galleries suck. Big time. The Acidfree Album module is currently the nicest and simplest option that I've found for using images in Drupal but it's far from perfect. If you're going to archive fanart, you need something more like Coppermine. Once again, you could bridge the two or write a module to integrate Coppermine into Drupal, but I really don't think that any existing Drupal modules are up to the task.
I've also been told that Drupal's built-in forums aren't very powerful for large sites. They're fine for the site that I'm running in RL since it's a small non-profit club that probably will never have more than a handful of active topics and a dozen or so forums at most, but they're apparently not that great for a truly large site with many forums and active threads.
In addition to eFiction bridged with Coppermine, another option for the archive side of things would be Fabulister (http://www.fabulister.com), the script powering Lexicon (http://www.transformersfanfic.com), the massive Transformers fanfic and fanart archive. The script was commissioned by Charlotte Brogden, the archive's maintainer, specifically for fanfic and fan art. It's GPL but I'm not sure if the source code has ever actually been publicly posted, though I'm sure that Charl would be happy to make it available to this project.
Even if you're not interested in Fabulister, you may want to take a gander at the original 13-page feature list (http://www.fabulister.com/index.php?cat=11) that it was designed and built from. That may be of use in determining features for the new archive.
I'm not saying that Drupal shouldn't be part of the picture - but I don't think that it's the whole picture. It may make a good frame for the site as a whole, but I really don't think that it's a good choice for the fic and art archive and I can't see the point of designing a new module from scratch for that purpose. Why re-invent the wheel when there's several perfectly good wheels out there that can be modded to fit the need?
One other sidenote: regardless of the backend software used, you'll probably want to look into some sort of import script to pull in fic from existing archives such as the various eFiction and Automated Archive versions. Generally speaking, when people get out of the fan archive hobby, they don't have the time and/or interest to manually transfer the whole thing to a new system; you're going to need a quick-and-easy method to pull the stories and art over or it's not going to happen.