Adam,
My suggestion would be to put out a competition on this.
Ask them build a CMS based site on subdomains on one of your lowest traffic names. (one subdomain per member on a niche of their choice)
Give them 20-30MB of hosting space.
In addition to being allowed to use thier own aff links, adsense etc. require them to add a DNF banner or ad somewhere in the page.
After 3-4 weeks close the competion and review each site built.
Choose the one(s) you like the best based on your criteria.
The winner gets the Exclusive contract to build your sites based whatever payment terms you and the winner agree on....
In the end you get
1. traffic to the domain name you used for this competition
2. have choices who you think have the best ideas/talent..a short list of people who can do future projects...
3. have other options if your first choice doen't pan out
4. probably get the CMS type site you are looking for....
All you really need to do is think about the logistics and criterias for the competition.
Everyone who decides to join in the end gets to learn something and perhaps have fun in the process.
If choosing on Rentacoder or Scriptlance, try with 1 or 2 sites first, per coder. I have found many lazy people there. They promise anything, and end up disappearing.
They just make me loose time closing the project, and having my money return and staying there in my account... still have money at RAC...
I would agree with you on that, as it has happend to me a few times, but in the process have also managed to find 1 great coder.
As to CMSInfusion, I think they spent a bigger % on affiliate commissions. In fact, most people should have used an affiliate link. There were lots of cool bonuses everywhere. I didn't offer mine, because I wasn't an affiliate
Even so, whenever their cut was, it was an excellent income for such a script. Nothing like the IM market. I started there 5 years ago, but then moved to the domain business. To be honest, I regret it. I could be a "guru" by now.
It was $497/sale (got my share of sales in too, enough to pay for getting the package myself). Redirecting traffic from expired names that used to be IM sites that were probable failures in its past life has it's uses...Domaining and IM can sometimes complement each other even though their methods more often than not conflict.
Well they have their own huge optin list and they started the pre-sales ahead of the affiliates so I'm sure they would have managed to get in quite a lot of sales of their own.