You are correct. Modifications to make the blog work better for news postings have been requested before, and those changes are noted on the roadmap. In the meantime, the blog actually does work pretty well for news (see our example here). You can set a future publishing date if you want to "pre-post" a news release. The main thing that you'll need to do is manually clean out old posts periodically, since there is no expiration date.

Also, as of version 2.3.5.8, you can use the Feed Manager feature to display an animated scroll of the news "blog" posts on your home (or other) pages.

Hope that helps.

Jamie