I’m looking to customize functionality: how articles are displayed, etc.

I’m looking to use WP to handle and display various articles on my site. As my site stands now, WP would take the place of three pages. One page displays links to the five most recent articles; it does *not* show the text of the articles itself. The second page displays an list of the archived articles (all the articles *not* on the first page I mentioned). And the third page would the page(s) used to display the actual articles themselves once a users clicks on the corresponding link from the “recent” or “archive” page.

So here’s what I would like to do and I’m hoping that someone might have some ideas as to how I might do this, what plugins I can use, or if I should be looking at a different app.

1) Whenever I add a new article, the “most recent” page is updated with a link to that article. Also the article that was previously the last on the “most recent” list will be automatically bumped to the archive page.
2) For the archive page, I would like the list to be sortable, such as by title, date, topic, that sort of thing.
2) Also for the archive page, I would like to be able to have the list span multiple pages. For instance once there are 20 articles listed, once a 21st is added the list will span two pages.
3) And finally, I’d like to make the actual article page itself span multiple pages in the event I get carried away and write a lot. I hate reading single page posts that scroll down for days and days and days.

My website already does what I want… in a manual sort of way. In otherwords anytime I make changes to the lists I have to update the HTML, or if I want an article to be multiple pages I have to create multiple HTML pages for it; *way* to much over head for my tastes.

Thanks everyone!