As for Misc/NEWS, we could stick with the plan of moving to a file-based solution but have external contributors actually write the NEWS entry. Core devs could then request any rewrite they have for the entry which wouldn't be a huge burden thanks to GitHub's in-browser editor. We could even go as far as having a Misc/NEWS status check that flags when there is no Misc/NEWS entry (that may be an issue, though, if in the future we choose to have commits be blocked by failing status checks; won't happen until our test suite is not flaky, though).