LOL - @John_Betong - Your demo is AWESOME and thanks for making it generally available. I was already all over it a few days before you arrived. 
In the end, because the features we need seem to all have already been created in a similar system using Drupal, I have reluctantly decided to use… Drupal. We’re going to go with Drupal 7 for now even though Drupal 8 looks really cool and seems to have a lot done. I was warned that modules may not be compatible and get used to incompatibilities every step of the way as Drupal 8 becomes refined. I noticed that the code base is now HUGE and we are talking 30+ MB HUGE.
Just so everyone who was following and may follow will know and might benefit, I just found that recreating the entire system with custom development will invite problems should we ever leave. I was asked to make sure that someone else taking over can continue to run the project and I do know they have Drupal developers there. In addition tot he Faceted Search like Amazon, there are some other important features that will unquestionably take time to build from scratch:
- Searches saved to user accounts
- Multi-language document management (Drupal does both the interface and, more importantly, handles content translations more elegantly such as the same content body in several different languages.)
- Relationships between files/nodes with arbitrary relationships (which is what the “Relations” module supposedly does and creates tabs for relating nodes)
- Handling of Documents to either use the text or the document itself
- Ease in printing out documents to different formats such as RTF, Word, PDF, HTML
- The drill down Amazon search described above but also using a variety of different interfaces and predefined fields, such as dates.
Thank you everyone SO MUCH for helping me think through this problem and the discovery of all these great tools and information.