One of the most powerful and most useful modules on Drupal is Views. With one screen you can build custom pages & blocks based around your content, select the exact fields you need, add filters and arguments, and relatively easily customize the display, and that's just scratching the surface. In fact, Views is so flexible that I've built sites which have 90% of their architecture based solely around taxonomies and Views.

A quick tip.. while working on an install profile in Drupal I discovered that the menu_link_save() function requires an internal URL, e.g. "node/123" instead of "my-cool-page". Once I tracked down the issue I was able to very easily create lots of menu items as needed, but it wasn't entirely obvious this was needed.