What do you way of allowing all users to write diaries and stories? I don't think any of the three recommended diaries which you rightly say are not FP material would have been written as stories. I don't intend to see the Barcelona meetup on the front page, but some of the other "serious" articles I write fall in a different category. Apparently the original scoop configuration included a "moderation queue" for stories, the best of which then made it to the front page.

So, it might be worth considering making the "diary" section more explicitly a "user blogs" section by a change of name, and re-introducing the story moderation queue.

Scoop was originally developed for use on Kuro5hin and was designed to allow user submissions of content much like Slash, another somewhat similar CMS. But where Slash and its flagship site, Slashdot, relied on a small group of editors to decide what content was actually published, Kuro5hin and Scoop aimed to allow moderation by the users themselves. Scoop's solution was to introduce a "moderation queue" where submitted stories would be visible to registered users, and where users could vote on whether a story should be published; a story which garners enough positive votes to cross a (configurable) "posting threshold" will become publicly visible, and a story which collects too many negative votes will be deleted.

...

While one of Scoop's main strengths is its innovative story- and comment-moderation system, a host of other features are available. For users, Scoop offers a number of conveniences:
* Individual weblogs or "diaries" which bypass story moderation and post to a separate section of the site.

I consider the Salon an Open Thread, neither diary nor story. And you're right the ability to be creative in the Open thread/Salon header is a plus. But maybe the front page could just display the last two Open Threads (one Salon and one Evening open thread, in either order) and 8 front-page stories.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."