Finding an essay planner / outlining / notecard program!

Having problems writing an essay (on moral panics + crime) for my Open University social science course, whilst I have written many essays before, tiny word limits and strict restrictions mean that I have to really pick and choose what to put in it. As I was (attempting) to write my plan I found myself drawing arrows all over the place and thought this would be easier if I wrote each idea of a piece of paper (or index card) and re-arranged until satisfied. Then I thought there must be some software for doing this without having to use lots of silly bits of paper.

I already use KeyNote to organise ideas and forum posts/e-mail correspondence that I may need to use again and I use mindjet mindmanager for notetaking and brainstorming, but neither of these do exactly what I want, although mindmanager is probably closest to what I want.

I tried TheLiteraryMachine, which I have tried for other writing tasks before, but it is still so ridiculously complicated - so that was a non-starter. I also found a couple of commercial software, but none of them seem to do what I want either;

• SuperNotecard looks a bit advanced and more geared towards fiction writers, although I may check out the trial.
• NoteWorthy Virtual Notecards looks interesting, but doesn't appear to have a way of eventually arranging your virtual 'cards' into an outline / essay plan.

I found a freeware program Text Block Writer, which looks interesting and will probably do the job, it will let me re-arrange my 'notecards' and will produce an outline that can be imported into word (yeay!); however it is a bit rough around the edges, it has an unusual layout and some bizarre quirks, such as columns for placing cards into and lots of different editing spaces. It also doesn't have a search or a way of grouping/linking cards (e.g. these card must always stay with this card or this card must always come after that card). There appears to be a new paid for version of this software called Text Block Author, but this appears to be basically the same, but it does have a search facility (which is a big plus!).
Text Block Writer is basically a digalisation of re-arranging notecards manually, obviously without any extra features this is still useful, after all for paper notecards you need;

• lots of space to rearrange the cards,
• have lots of crossing out when you want to reword a point
• land up losing a crucial card
• have to type it all out into your word processor when you're done.

Perhaps I am just being greedy, but it seems silly just to replicate notecards when computers can do so much more.

After some more searching I found out I was basically looking for something called an outliner (Wikipedia: outliner + why the outliner tool is the essential tool for everybody), of which keynote is one and mindmaps are similar to (and apparently evernote, another program I use (essentially as a never-ending notebook) also counts as an outliner). This yielded a whole lot more results that before, there seem to be a wide variety of outlining programs each with different feature-sets and many programs are customised for specific uses (e.g. programming, writing etc). Not sure if I will find one that does what I want, think I'll probably land up using text block writer for this assignment, what with it being due on Tuesday and all!