[NTLDR]

* multiple portal pages for a single vB installation (example, a car website might have a main portal page for its home, but then have a Ford page, a Chevy page, etc... )

There are two methods to do this depending on if you want each page to have different new etc for the page.

* selecting more than one news forum for news on one page (this merges the news from the forums selected into one date sorted stream for the news on that page - example, the Ford page might have taurus, mustang, and explorer news forums included in Ford news.

This requires one minor query edit to use multiple forums.

* list of most popular threads in a forum

Not part of the default package, but would be very simple to add.

* list of most recently added threads in a forum
* list of most recently update threads in a forum

By default this gets the most recent threads from all forums, however can easily be changed to get them from one forum.

* ability to do multiple lists of news headlines per page.

No sure what you mean by this one.

Would this hack be a good base for me to recreate these pages? I don't mind making changes to it to get what I need, I just need a solid foundation.

Overall I don't think you would need to make many changes to this hack to get it to do what you want.