Let's take a serious look ar what we want the front page to  achieve, and once we have figured that one out we can look at other "views" like the diary list, the single-diary view, the user's diary page, etc.

To be clear, the front page displays the top 10 (is this configurable?) "stories", or "promoted" user "diary entries", but diary entry promotion does not turn it into a story (as only stories can go into the debate box, and promoted diaries can not).

I suppose someone should take a look at the scoop "class hierarchy" and try to explain it for the layman ET user so that it can be tweaked. As I say upthread, we have inherite a particular tweaked version of the (allegedly very configurable) scoop hierarchy, used by Kos for DKos.

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