TBH, I don't feel much going through yet another website migration.

Putting news on is not all that much work. Unfortunately its not possible to select a topic in the forum and just 'promote' it to a news item, but a simple copy/paste with some minor moderation does the trick well.

IMO, what we need is a few people willing to help out in this particular area.
What I'm currently doing on my site is using Simple Portal (http://simpleportal.net) which has a feature that will allow you to select a board of which it's topics will appear in the portal. For PGD you can setup a moderated board for user submitted news and once its approved it will show up on the front page, ala GameDev.net and DevMaster.net.

All the MODs used on the site are free with the exception of:[*]SMF Store ($89US)[*]Newsletter Pro ($45)[*]Twitter and Facebook Publisher copyright removal ($15US)[*]MF Advanced Topic Prefix ($10US)

I too had lots of trouble with customized themes and eventually gave up and just starting using the new curve default theme (SMF 2.0).