I'll expand a bit on why I went with the module that I selected. First of all, I made this migration well over a year ago, and I know that the DNN blog module has had improvements, and that more are on the roadmap, so if some of these items are now in the core module, I apologize.
At the time I had many issues if you will with the blog module and my future plans for my blog. The first major issue was that I needed the ability to have multiple authors inside of a single blog. The second issue was that I needed a bit of workflow possibility to allow guest posters to submit their articles, but I had to be the one to approve before they go live. Also the SEO aspects were a major part of the deal as well. News Articles includes the URL rewriting pieces needed to generate the friendly URL's referenced in the above posts.
I also found the News Articles templates and other features easier to use and understand with a single module providing ALL functionality and configuration settings. I can say that since I have made the change I've never really thought of doing anything else, so I think that is a good sign...