A Faction Server In the Making

Hi guys, Im new to the bukkit forums, but I used to host a server a year or two ago. Now, my friends and I are trying to make a new faction server modeling off a server we used to play on called "digital warzone". DWZone was a tremendously populated server that made diamonds rare. You couldn't mine diamonds - you would get gold and iron ingots - and buying them was extremely expensive. Does anyone have any help to offer? I'm looking for a good factions plugin. Which is the most reliable?

I am also looking for a plugin that will assist us in making a third world called the "aether", it is supposed to look something like a bunch of floating islands/land masses, like the aether mod.
Also, we were considering trying out a free market - one that is completely unsupervised and no official currency, the goal being to forge true alliances unlike most faction servers seen today.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I've only seen SimpleClans used for factions, and it's what I'll be using on my factions/objective server. As for world generation, you could fool around with Terrain Control. Tough to learn the whole thing, but really great once you get it down.

Can you describe the "free market" idea to me? Sounds interesting.