You sound like you are on the right track to me, Octoprof. I did this with my two hybrid courses in the fall and things worked for the students who accepted the idea of a hybrid course.
The tricky part about hybrids is that some students don't want to accept that both pieces of the course are necessary. Thus, I had students who were mad because not everything was online and students who were mad because they had no clue how to do some things because they didn't believe that the online part should count.
Perhaps we need a thread just on that! "How to get hybrid course students to do the half of the course they do not prefer..."
My online students seem to finally get that the online stuff is required because there is no non-online stuff (except for exams, which are given in the traditional fashion, more or less, on a date defined in the syllabus but at a testing center at the time of the student's choosing).
I'll have two hybrid courses in the fall. The hybrid version of the course I'm teaching full-online this term, plus a hybrid section of a different (sophomore level intro) course, which I will also teach another section of as full online, simultaneously.
Since I've proven I can build a quality online course, I'm now the go-to cephalopod for putting courses online or partially online and freeing up much needed classroom space. I'm not complaining, though.