@Captain I know quite a bit of WPF and general XAML stuff still. It will exist for the next 10 years pretty safely, so it's not a bad choice.
Anyway, you want simple CRUD stuff? I'd start plain and simple, with at most MEF for composition, and some nice MVVM. I have a thread in here somewhere about that, but even as simple as it is, it's probably more than you need.
Construct good, clear models, and datagrids will be pretty easy - custom columns complicate everything a lot, though. WPF has no free editable pivot grids, so if the need for one of those comes up, you're probably out of luck.
As for UI style, you may be better leaving that alone. Maybe get a ribbon, but everything else will update as the windows theme updates, so as long as you don't template things, they will never look out of place. The system is there because it's sometimes needed, but the temptation to mess with that stuff overpowers a lot of people.
Just try to keep it all simple. If you need to do UI validation, simple will be out the window, but for most other things, you should be fine.