Mark-Kashman thank you so much for the feedback.
Gathering from that, I assume the "out of the box" road to take is to create smaller organizational team/comm sites and roll the up in some kind of "corporate portal" (read: Ignite Announcement) or, for those who want to custom develop/create, through various search webparts.
Got it.
The only thing left is some kind of overarching navigation with a more top/down (or Tree) approach than the current Sharepoint Home implementation. I'd like to through in a suggestion here, since it may be a tiny additional development step: you're already creating a new SharePoint Admin Center that lists all SiteCollections. I believe it is not that far off to create a webpart off of this that shows all sites (not just collections) with refiner options (owner, type [team vs comm], classification, created, last modified, kind [public vs private], ...) and one that is trimmed based on permissions.