I really wish Arch had something similar to Gentoo's "eselect news" system that actually displays these notices alongside system updates and lets you query news articles from your terminal.

Exactly. You're not supposed to pacman -Syu without looking. Part of your duty when you choose to install Arch is to take a few minutes every week to keep on top of what's new. Call it basic hygiene.

Yet none of the setup guides really stress this and there's no preferred method to keep up to date on things. Arch really needs a better system for making it obvious when nontrivial updates are about to happen.

Note, I use pacmatic, which pulls the news feeds, but it took me getting bitten a few times before I learned to do this.