I ended up creating a module to solve my last problem.
Everything is working well, except I can't figure out how to do one thing.

I would like the page title (in the HTML head) to be decided by the dynamic content of the page. I can't figure out how to do this, as it seems that this is fixed in stone by the title value set in the items array in the hook_menu function at the time the module is activated. However, I know this dynamic titling is possible, because other modules (specifically the forum module) do it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.