> the visual hierarchy inherent to newspaper title design is an important benefit of the format

Agreed. This is also why old-school print design product catalogs often had superior presentation compared to today's web UIs for browsing hierarchically organized products. Everything is given the same visual weight and is formatted the same way.

Anyway, improving on what you did with the tooling that's easily available in 2024 but wasn't in 2009 seems like a fun challenge.