XF 2.3 Will advanced routing solve this?

[kpmedia]

I no longer wish to maintain multiple sites. I want to collapse everything Reddit-style, with a single user sign-on across site. Ideally using a single XenForo install. Then users could cross-participate, single PM/DM box. And for my sanity, I get a single admin interface, single backup.

And yet, I do want to retain separate sites. Google apparently still treat subdomains like separate sites.

Let's pretend this is what I have:

• site about gardening
• site about cooking, baking
• site about household cleaning

So the topics are not the same, but are related. You grow it, you cook, you clean it all up. But each topic really is large enough to justify it's own full site. Each site can also maintain it's own identity, own connected social media presences.

Let's say the original site was about cooking, and it was "www.myfood.com"
Other site names don't matter
I'm thinking about "cooking.myfood.com", "gardening.myfood.com", and "cleaning.myfood.com"
The main "www." would all 301 redirect to "cooking."
I'd make a new one-pager "hello.myfood.com", introducing the site, and showcasing the top entries from the 3 subdomains. non-www myfood.com would direct there.

Ideally, each subdomain index page would be some sort of XenForo-driven "top story" that I manually change each week, then all the forums as usual

I'm not sure how the Media and Resources would work, but one step at a time.

I saw there was a buggy plugin, now several years old. I want nothing to do with plugins, if avoidable. I prefer to do do as much as possible with the official XenForo code.

Worst case is I want to do the folders, appearing as 3 separate sites
myfood.com/cooking
myfood.com/gardening
myfood.com/cleaning

I'd like for each to have different sub-themes, mostly separate logos and colors. Some sort of top-of-page navigation would swap between the sites.

Thanks for reading all of that.

What are my options?

And any examples of this being implemented anywhere?