I want to use RapidWeaver but

Flash,

RW can have a blog - there are many ways of doing that - if you find you ever need to.

Remember that the many Themes that both come with RW and can be bought as third-party enhancements control your pages’ look and feel, the CSS-based skin, if you like - as is the case with WP.

For your 2 and 5 there are several third party Add-ons which will do what you want.

RW has sophisticated and flexible control over how you define and implement metatags.

The code in RW is already optimized - and you do have the ability to fine tune it further.

Since the code generated by RW is usually optimized, you’ll get good page load speeds.

For your 4, it’s not a web page as such which builds, maintains and manages a mailing list. It’s often a database-driven application, perhaps using PHP/MySQL residing on the server. You’d possibly end up using something like this for that.

I’d start with that Community page and sift around in there to see just what’s available.

For example, although not part of RW itself, many people use a major third party plugin called Stacks. It has stacks (components available to drop into the Stacks framework) to do most things that most users want.

You’ll also find this forum helpful in answering queries you have; good luck!