Thanks much Smurkas, I'll be interested to see what someone who know what they are doing can make of it (O: Oddly enough I'm not too concerned about the functionality of the child pages lists as they do what is needed - edit and view. But it will probably need the bit of filtering code updated at some point - per dio5's updated method or similar.
As I keep saying... the amount of pages generated by news and blogs really inspire a desire to get more Page-like support for DataObjects. IMO DataObjects are definitely a better way to go for this sort of bulk item.
See attached snaps of the admin side of a DataObject based (no HidePages) News and Events module I made up for the Department. As you might imagine from the choices for HidePages it has a reasonably adaptable set of options for display of news in a variety of ways and groupings as well as good support for templates to access articles. If only I could work out why it sometimes orphans the articles (O: It has no calendar display yet despite the checkbox to enable it.
See News and Events in action at at infosci.otago.ac.nz both on the front page (events & recent news) and the News and Events Pages. The only thing it does not have is a proper editor as (previously mentioned) the HTMLEditorField does not work in the javascript pop-up. But it will be nicer to have a form that users can use to Post or Edit news without having to go into the CMS anyway.
Woohoo, and now to break my development site with an upgrade to 2.4.2... I guess I'll soon find out if HidePages works with it... and everything else I've hacked up.