In case you all didn't hear about it at SPC 2019, along with SharePoint Home Site, they mentioned a lot of other things in the works as well that affect a lot of the above questions and requests...
- Assign a site collection as root (basically, change your root site) - coming soon
- Multiple Home Sites - being worked on, probably coming after initial launch
- Better filtering of News pages that can point to all sites in your tenant. - coming soon
- Hero News Web part (show the news items as hero images like the current image hero webpart) - coming soon
- My SharePoint (SharePoint Home, will be a featured link on the Home Site Nav bar and could solve a lot of requests for a personalization home site) - part of SharePoint Home Site launch
- Universal search on the O365 bar that allows kql queries. (badly needed for my environment!)
*Not mentioned!
- Conversion of a root site to communication site or home site. (An MS dev told me the SPFX framework of modern pages makes this next to impossible)
- Nothing about on-prem SharePoint getting these features.
Microsoft