Dynamic and/or flexible content types
A CMS like Drupal is a way to create structured content types to make it easier to author large numbers of pages with the same structure. This is actually great from a user experience perspective, as the user expects information to be presented to her in a consistent manner from one page to the next.

The user will be fine with multiple presentation types if the information architecture is consistent, but if your structure is all over the map, the user will quickly tire of having to figure things out.

So for the majority of your site, plain old content types will probably serve you best. 

If you are talking about overview pages, then getting used to Panels will probably make it something other than a 'last resort'. It is quite powerful, and customizable. The alternative, if you wanted daily customization, would be to create a single content type, and add and remove fields at will. However, I believe that after a while you are going to wish you had selected to use panels. Eventually you are going to want to re-use something you had before.

When you are using a CMS, think in terms of building blocks, and how to combine them to reach your goals.