Also, real question - outside of commandline apt how often is NEWS even shown to a user at all? I know numerous people with debian machines who do not install stuff through the command line. Also, what about all of the other ways of installing a package? If I'm setting up a ton of systems through ansible playbooks I can pretty much promise you I don't even know what a NEWS is nor is it likely I would care.
At some point it's a lot more useful to accept it's the fault of the medium, NEWS, rather than the fault of users not modifying their workflows to work around NEWS.