Thanks for your response, I will keep thinking about a way to make it work, as I would like to use the theme for the rest of my site. Perhaps I'll have a separate WordPress installation for the news section and try to make it look similar.
One suggestion for you: I'm not sure whether it is possible, but an easy solution would be to have an option to display category pages as automatically generated layouts (a basic grid) that could have pagination. That way people could have a "news" category, and its category page would function very similarly to a blog.
If you ever come out with the Gridder plugin that can be used with other designs I will definitely buy that!