Geolocation to show only meetups near you?
Preferences option to hide meetups unless they're within X km of you?
I do not support removing Meetups from the front page until such time as it can be assumed that there is one in every major city where large portions of the poulation speak English, conditional upon meetups not completely taking over the front page.
Some people travel frequently and could be interested in distant meetups. So this ought to be switchable, and that needs more coding. First we should have a basic meetup management working, and later such refinements can be added, if there are volunteers willing to code them.
I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.
And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.