Inline theme switching?

Hi All, and Happy New Year!

I’m pretty darn new at this stuff (though I’ve been saying that for three years), so ya know, please forgive my n00binity.

To sum up – I created some themes with Artisteer and I’m using Headspace 2 to use per page themes. I use Custom Widgets to place my widgets where I want them. This gives me the ability to have a ‘shifting’ site in which the shape changes but the style stay the same. It’s a ‘hybrid’ with a static, magazine style front page, a blog, an articles ‘encyclopedia,’ a how-to tutorials section, and a reviews section.

Well, I’ve got the magazine front and the blog working perfectly to my satisfaction, and I’m now looking for some guidance with the encyclopedia, tutorials, and reviews sections.

I’ve been looking into categories for these, but when I do category listing of posts, I get some weird effects. I’d really like to be able to have a directory at the front of each section – with, like, a list of category sections and a blurb . . . I’d like not to lose my photo captions (which is happening when I list my categories, I think because I switched themes.)

What I think would be super handy is the ability to not only assign themes per page, but also theme OPTIONS per page. I’m no php coder, but I think I could benefit from a hack that made this possible, if such a thing exists. I tried the switch_theme function and that completely broke everything – perhaps because I need a switch_theme_back, or something I don’t know about . . . The settings were identical, except for stylistic things, but man, it broke it all real good.

If anyone has a site like the one I’m describing, I’d sure appreciate some guidance about what direction to go with this stuff. Plugins, hacks, opinions, whatever it takes.

Thanks! WordPress is awesome!