Goal
Need some advice regarding building user review (UGC) directory for a product category – not sure if it's a good idea to use wordpress to build. I will provide some context below and all advices are much appreciated.
Background
I've been running a media company using wordpress self hosted for the past decade. I am more on the editorial side but I self host the site myself on Cloudways. I am no dev but I understand the basic workings of wordpress, at least on the CMS side and can do basic design work myself for the landing page, Woocommerce store (we have a really successful LMS online course with just basic simple design making us really profitable for 6 years running).
The directory
I have this idea of wanting to build a product directory (in the road bicycle industry) where I will list out the product and user can come create their account and submit their own review of said products. I want to do this because the products in the road cycling markets are generally expensive ( a good racing bike can cost upwards of 10,000 USD). So the more we have user feedback, the more informed the buyer is. And generally there's no central place to check all the reviews. I believe there's a real use case here from the survey I conducted with 1000+ participant.
Industry context
My main media business is also in road cycling industry so I am well familiar with all the players and businesses in this industry. This will be a local site (in my language, not English). I want to start this as a passion project but expand to be a real business if there's enough user. Either through premium listing (for sponsor) or affiliate links to the relevant shops under each product page.
Now the feature don't have to be complicated or fancy like G2 Crowd or Trustpilot. I want a really simple user submittable review directory website with the main functionality be listing, filtering, and user submitted review.
I understand that this will require some sort of directory plugin, filtering plugin like WPFacet, custom post type plugin, and a form submission plugin. That's about the extent of my knowledge. Do I need anything more, anything less? I understand it's buildable with WordPress but when I ask dev friends they said they would custom code it. While affordable to me, I don't know the workings of anything else other than WordPress and I rather run business than twiddle with the code. If it's built with WP environment at least I can understand it.