Might I suggest that you (the person reading this) help the problem by actually writing a promoted post for the front page?
If you don't like there being nothing insightful to read, why not provide something?
Promotion is not done by the author. The only reliable way to write a promoted post is to start a Rationality Quotes thread or to announce a meetup. Nor do insights come on demand.
People are clearly more comfortable with writing posts in the discussion section. It may be caused by loss aversion with respect to karma and perceived higher standards for the top level posts. Telling that we should write more will probably not fix that; it is analogous to saying that the criminals should be less immoral as a reaction to complaints about high level of criminalit...
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.