Will Playa work for me...?

Edit Subject

Hi,

Im new to EE and I am currently building a directory website. Entries will be user submitted via a SAEF, and will be heavily focused on geographical location. I have been thinking about the best way to set this up, and was going to go down the route of adding entries into Parent (Country) and Child (Counties) categories.

Then when searching the directory users could select via dropdowns the county/counties and then hit search and be presented with results.

But I would also like to filter these down further, based on indivdual fields being present.

Each entry will have a number of photos, and list of features that that the user selects with checkboxes, (these features are what i want to filter down further when searching), a description, and a location selected via google maps/other means.

I have the Matrix add on, which I am currently using to hold the entries photos, but I was wondering if I could make better use of Matrix together with Playa, to achieve my intended results.

Being new to EE, i'm not quite sure about the best way to go about it.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!