Tags within metadata values, or else merged with custom taxonomies?

Hi there,

Newbie disclaimer: I’ve attempted to find this information via board searching and broader google searching – I may have failed at searching, but I have at least tried. :p I am using WordPress 3.1.2 on a siteground shared hosting space (I installed it w/out fantastico, however). The site is fresh, only akismet has been activated so far.

As I attempt to port a Joomla! site to WordPress, I’m struggling with certain groups of information being compatible with one another. I will be posting theater reviews, within which I’d like to list the production staff and cast. To ease template editing, it seems I should be clustering these things as metadata, so:

(default custom field)Director: (value) Joan Blow
(default custom field)Sound Design: (value) Steve Jones

as well as

(unique custom field, name of role)Romeo: (value) Bob Freud
(unique custom field, name of role)Juliet: (value) Susan Cigar

My 1st question is – can the values of these keys “be” tags? I don’t want them segregated off into their own search results, if someone clicks the tag for “Bob Freud” (because he’s interviewed in an article, for example) then pages where he was a value for a metadata field should also be included. I realize I could simply tag posts with the values, but that’s a lot of duplicated effort and would make the use of “actual” tags fuzzier.

Relatedly – can the keys themselves “be” tags? For example, can the field “Romeo”, above, have tag functionality, link to a page showing all occurrences, etc…? I’m thinking of wiki-like functionality, (and yes, I’m searching on wiki-related terms as well…).

My 2nd main question is – from the experienced developers’ PoV, am I asking for trouble lumping all of this into metadata? I considered non-hierarchical taxonomies as an alternative to metadata for the “default” fields, if only to make it easier to break things out when editing my template. I guess a better clarifying question might be “can I group metadata fields so that I can place all <foo> metadata formatted in one fashion and all <foobedoo> metadata formatted in another fashion”? If not, for templating’s sake I’d probably move more common metadata into taxonomies.

I’ve also been going down the WP-as-CMS search rabbit hole, but before I dive in to that completely I want to explore these simpler options first.

Many thanks in advance,

John