New stages have numerous news items listed that are likely not relevant, but are shown due to limitations in the filtering in NEWS items. E.g. on a recent stage3:
nspawntest / # eselect news list
News items:
[1] N 2013-09-27 Separate /usr on Linux requires initramfs
[2] N 2014-06-15 GCC 4.8.3 defaults to -fstack-protector
[3] N 2014-10-26 GCC 4.7 Introduced the New C++11 ABI
[4] N 2015-02-02 New portage plug-in sync system
[5] N 2015-07-25 Python 3.4 enabled by default
[6] N 2015-08-13 OpenSSH 7.0 disables ssh-dss keys by default
[7] N 2015-10-22 GCC 5 Defaults to the New C++11 ABI
[8] N 2016-06-19 L10N USE_EXPAND variable replacing LINGUAS
[9] N 2017-11-30 New 17.0 profiles in the Gentoo repository
Many of these are always displayed. For example:
has "Display-If-Installed: sys-apps/portage" and will be displayed on nearly every Gentoo machine. While relevant in 2015; I'm skeptical that its relevant today. I am also considering explicit changes in the filtering directives to resolve this in the future.