[pcowans]

Okay, cool - so it seems like you do actually have quite a specific piece of technology missing, but it also seems to me that this is an architecture / technical design problem rather than just needing someone to code it up. It also seems that it's pretty core to what you're trying to do, which to me suggests that you really need a find a way for yourself or someone with a long terms stake in the project to own this piece.

If you were able to encapsulate that part of you product (the simulation and associated data store), would you feel comfortable architecting the rest of the system (whatever that is - web interface, associated company website, etc.) and bringing someone else on board as a contractor using fairly standard technology (e.g. Rails / Django)? If you could do that it'd free you up to focus on learning the bits which really matter.

Putting my two cents in technically, the way you're describing this makes me think that it's not necessarily a good fit for a traditional RDBMS - 'hundreds' of tables of fields strikes me as an unconventional way to use these technologies, but I don't know enough about the problem you're solving to suggest what might be more appropriate.