sorry, thought of an addition:
the website will have a fair amount of user submitted content, how does ez publish handle this? and how can this be managed and monitored?
thanks s
All of your requirements definitely achievable, except for the performance issue, which I cannot tell you as I've never handled such traffic myself, but I'm sure some other people have.
Comments & access control come out of the box. Relating articles definitely possible to implement, but depends on the logic of course. Prepaid publishing - I've done that, although in a slightly different model (publish before pay - test drive mode). But that's a technicality.