Need help with LMS decision....is Moodle that great?

Hello everybody -Took me a good hour to read these responses  and all very informative - thank you v much..-

I need some advice from you all please... here's my current situation:

Building a moodle lms using a team in India... we wanted some pretty complex features including a booking engine for tutors and students to book live lessons in for LIVE lessons. In addition we will have online preparation available to the students as well as integration to CMS Joomla for a subscription system for students.  All is going well on the programming side - however on the DESIGN side I'm experiencing some issue. Please shed some light

My questions are as follows:

1. DESIGN

Who can help us with the design of our interface? we have used a theme Aardvark the closest and only theme that looked remotely pretty... but the indian team are NOT designers - purely programmers. I need to know who can help make it look pretty. Will it cost a fortune and will it be difficult to hand over to a designer once all programming is done?  Is it difficult to customise within a theme or better to start from scratch?  Im struggling to know what the scope is for customising layout and design within a theme.

2. PLUGINS

we are at the stage of choosing the widgets/plugins/boxes on the sides of the page. I would like to know if you tell me how much time in the form of hours do the following plugins take for programmers to install:

a) instagram example in this LMS : http://vle.newbury-college.ac.uk

b) countdown plug in ( to countdown time until students next live lesson) : https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=66217

c) global chat : https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_gchat

I look forward to your response!