My very personal 2 cents on the matter of front-pages (but this isn't necessarily official "si-policy"): front-pages look nice, they can give a forum a nice bookmarkable page before you descend into the forum dungeon. But: they need to be maintained, which costs extra time, energy and dedication. The moment a community stops maintaining their front-page zealously (as seems to have happened some (long) time back at xsibase), they might as well kill the front-page altogether. A good front-page might not always be truly noticed, a badly outdated front-page however can do damage to what you're trying to achieve. Such an outdated front-page gets way more exposure than the good updated one could ever hope to achieve.
But in the end: The community, in the end, isn't in it because of the front-page, but because of the forums, that are on offer.
Maintaining a forum as such already is hard work enough, maintaining a - in my view - relatively unimportant front-page just for "keeping up appearances" just means more work for the lucky few called admins and mods...
