I have just spent an enlightening evening, getting to grips with some Drupal basics. I have a few questions, hopefully someone can give me some feedback.

I had always been informed that Drupal and Joomla were very similar, as far as I can see I am completely misinformed?

As a CMS I use CMS Made Simple, I find I can template a site as quickly in that as I could hand coding HTML, what is the templating engine like, how flexible is it, CMS Made Simple is as easy as adding a tag to a template.

Concerning modules what is the learning curve like, is it fairly easy to start extending Drupal?

I make modules for property sites, and that is usually a case of a list of fields in a database, could I use CCK to achieve this?