Hey bloggers, I need some help!

Hello fellow bloggers and assorted other people. I need your help.

See, I'm interested in starting another blog (not related to this one) and I know there are at least a few of you out there who read me and also run your own blogs.

I'm pretty familiar with the Blogger/Blogspot offerings at this point, and am wondering if there's something better out there I should be using. Blogger's okay, but it's pretty basic and uninspiring. Plus the "make a blog before you can comment" policy is desperately stupid, and in general the commenting system is pretty poor.

So do any of you other bloggers have any advice for me? I'm looking for something that allows a good deal of customization, has a good privacy policy (I love my anonymity!), gets listed reasonably well by search engines, and allows more fine-grained control over the commenting system. I'm no slouch with computers, so ease of use is less of a concern for me than power and the ability to make it work the way I want.

I've read various reviews here and there, but they tend to be by people who've just switched to a new system, and are likely to miss a lot of the frustrations and quirks that a longer-term user would know about.

I'm open to pretty much anything, from sticking to Blogger (or Blogger with a different commenting system) to Wordpress, Movable Type, etc., to just buying some server space and installing an open-source CMS on it. If anyone can provide input on the perks (and especially the drawbacks) of their preferred blogging system it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!