SharePoint Online Intranet - A new approach? What are your thoughts?

I was debating all this myself internally and I assume Microsoft will make the following changes sometime next year:

• Add a "news headlines" element to the SharePoint Waffle Landing Page that aggregates all news pages from all the sites that you have access to or are following
  • similiar to the News Tab in the iOS SharePoint App
• Introduce the modern Publishing Pages features.
  • It'll be interesting to see how they enhance the current modern pages, since in theory (and pratically) you are already publishing (modern) pages and news

We'll probably go this route:

• reconfigure the current sharepoint root site collection to "modern", and find some appropriate name for it
  • add modern subsites for departments and branches that host content that was previously shared in a dedicated Intranet. Stuff that one departments offers to all users or specific locked down document library for a subset of users
    • separate subsites are needed in order for the SharePoint News features to show up as "from department XYZ". (Question: how do I prevent subsites from opening in another tab?)
  • push this default root site collection to all users somehow
  • Future Iteration: make the root site collection some how personalized instead of generic
• O365 Groups (+Sites) for all other stuff (internal department stuff, projects, interest groups and so on ...)
• Custom Site Collections for future larger projects/apps and publish those as Waffle Icons in the O365 Launcher.