recommended way of making new "views"

In the past, in "traditional" themes, I've made templates for different views I need. But I love this theme so far and I want to do it the right way...

I want to make the site I'm working on pretty upgrade proof so we're using Atahualpa for it. What is the recommended way for me to configure a special category view. For example,

I need to list FAQs in one convention like this:

faq 1
faq 2
faq 3


faq 1 (anchor link from the faq1 above, not to the article's permalink)
Blah blah blah blah

faq 2
........... blah blah

faq 3
........... blah blah.

Where the first section is a link to a deep anchor to the faq1 body below, but each FAQ is a blog post categorized under FAQ, all under one page.

Do I *have* to copy index.php and make a new template to acomplish this? I'm trying to use php-exec right now to formulate a loop so I can keep it in the database and not worry too much when I am going to upgrade.

I need this for 3 other categories as well, and each will have different view but it really is just pulling blogposts with the logic based on their categories. For example, news, screencasts, regular-blog posts,

Thanks for any help you can give me.