Thanks for your response! No worries on the timing. I can't believe I saw it so soon after you posted considering I hadn't yet started following you. It was providential because I just happened to be in the forums looking at another issue off a google search and noticed the update.
Anyway, I really hope they produce the features again too! If for no other reason than simply to follow through on a full implementation of tags, since they seem to keep them around.
I personally landed on a different approach to the GTD method, abandoning TSW. In addition to providing a reliable structure for notebooks and notes and internal linking, with all of the EN keyboard shortcuts, it relies primarily on actually doing a weekly review, which I have reluctantly realized I cannot live without. Everything spirals out of control for me without that, even if I had all the speed of TSW, and trying to find a shortcut around that just hasn't worked. However, beginning to do regular reviews has been hugely helpful and reduced stress, even though my method isn't as fast as TSW.
As far as structure, it heavily uses internal linking in a similar way that Notion allows pages within pages to create infinitely deep dashboards. This gets past the otherwise flat three level hierarchy that EN provides by default (stacks / notebooks / notes). While I previously new about internal linking, I rarely used it compared to how I use it now. It has completely changed my mind about limitations I perceived in Evernote's hierarchy.
For that reason, I agree it would be nice if EN implemented Microsoft Loop functionality to provide synced-sections. I'm assuming when you refer to that, you're referring to the ability to, for instance, copy a certain amount of data from one place to another, creating a link instead of a copy, so that when the data is updated at the source, it updates at the link (or vice versa).