Thanks for the comments everyone. I think you have reassured me that what he is doing is the right choice for what we are building. He is indeed learning Drupa

Thanks for the comments everyone. I think you have reassured me that what he is doing is the right choice for what we are building. He is indeed learning Drupal more or less from scratch so for him the investment in helping me build my app (using his emplyees time) is that he gets to learn a new platform regardless of whether our startup works out. When I worked on projects with him before he was mostly doing the back-end database stuff and my in-house developer was doing the integration and front-end. It's good to know that for a review style website Drupal is not a bad choice. Even as a non-techie I find myself drinking the Ruby on Rails kool-aid (but at least I was aware of it)! The modules you mention are indeed the ones he was mentioning as useful for our project.