I've been talking about this for some years as well, but mostly without that audience of news professionals. I absolutely agree with your assessment that people won't be going back to that model of getting one subscription to pre-select what they can see that was the way in the paper age. Perhaps that could be the future if a past in which the decades of ad-funded free online news had never happened (I include "let's have an attractive web presence to lure people to our paper subscription" in ad-funded), but now that we are spoiled by having been able to read through the full political spectrum of publishers (and from every nation where they also write something in English), paying a subscription feels like paying to narrow access and that's just not very attractive.

What I imagine as an unlikely best-case model for reader-funded news isn't "spotify for news", but a "spotify for news without spotify": a step back to the print age where you'd have exactly one news subscription (unless you were particularly rich), but with what might be called reverse syndication, a profit share access scheme where every publisher acts as a spotify for its competitors. Provide proof of subscription with publication A to get a well-defined level of access at publications B,C and D, with a fixed part of the subscription fee divided amongst peers. The exact level of access would have to be well-defined of course, to prevent abusive strategies, but it could be something noticeably below "home subscription" (not ad-free perhaps?) but clearly above the free tier.