wordpress as a corporate cms

i’ve been doing some research into using wordpress as a backbone for a corporate website, and so far i’ve found a lot of “yeah!  do it!” style posts (here and here), but not a lot of explanations to go along with the success stories.  i’m more interested in the true pitfalls of the thing, or better yet one good story of absolute ruin (although, googling “wordpress ruined my life” got some entertaining results, yet worthless).

i’ve been evaluating wordpress for a while now, even used it to set up a site for a local coffee shop / bar (although work drew me away from it, but i’m back to working on it now).  i’m feeling pretty confident that it can be done, and done well.  the big things i need from this site:

1. consistent look and feel, even when being edited by multiple users
2. easy to use by people with different levels of experience, savvy
3. very little training necessary
4. robustness to user mistakes

i’d say wordpress wins on 1 through 3, but (possibly?) fails on 4.  i’m not sure the access controls are fine grained enough that i can set users loose on the site and expect them not to hose it.  it’s good when you work for a company that you can trust your users not to be malicious (i do, thankfully), but you can’t stop them from doing something wrong accidentally every now and again.

i need to research this further, for sure.  i set up a beta site tonight to try out different content management systems, and i’m going to run through a quick few just to make sure my familiarity with wordpress isn’t clouding my judgement.  ExpressionEngine is the first one i’m trying out, but i need to say i’m not very impressed so far (and it’s a tough sell when your budget is $0).

Anyone have experience?  I’d love to hear about it?