I have few questions regarding designing and developing an internet portal site
that will be a dashboard for advertisers in the telecom/web industry space and
will be utilizing MOSS 2007 as the framework. The site will have anonymous
areas and areas where forms auth will be implemented. It may also have a
NTLM/AD zone for administration.

There is a requirement for some customization/scheduling of content by the
marketing department. The rest of the content is what you would think would be
better served in a traditional .Net application. Searching for database
information to show pages with graphs/charts, tables, etc... The data will
mostly come from a sql server database that is fed by other databases and feeds.

There will be around 100,000 users. Unknown at this time how many will be
concurrent. I am aware of the licensing costs. $$$

Questions:

Is MOSS 2007 a good choice for this or am I about to shoot myself in the foot
trying to develop an internet facing site using it? I've seen the typical MOSS
examples like kroger.com, hawaiianair.com, and others. I've also read some of
the case studies where the teams that went in and implemented these relate the
horrors while still advocating MOSS. I just don't want to become an advocate
because "I Survived Internet Facing MOSS Development".

Should I be using web parts exclusively for all the pages where presentation
will display data that comes from our own business/data tiers or is there some
way to make this feel more .Net'ish from a developer standpoint? I've been
experimenting with 'feature' projects and the SharePoint templates in VS2008,
and so far everything seems pretty primitive and painful. Particularly the
inability to use ascx files without sacrificing security by using smartpart or
something similar.

One reason to use MOSS is my impression that it will scale better and easier
than a from-scratch .Net site simply because my client's network services group
has experience in setting up sharepoint sites on farms for their intranet use.
I'm not sure they have experience setting up farms for regular asp.net
applications. Is this a valid point? Or is MOSS a bad choice when looking at
performance.

Is there a recommended book that would speed my curve on this from a .Net
developer's perspective. Everything is so mixed review-wise.