My personal solution is to treat the URL of http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts as my Less Wrong home page, since it appears to load all articles from Main and Discussion equally for convenient viewing in newest to oldest order without kruft. I can't claim original credit for this url (which doesn't appear to be prominently linked anywhere that I see), since I'm fairly sure someone else showed this feature to me, but it has been long enough ago that I don't remember who.

If I were to be charitable, I could say the front page appears oriented to people who aren't familiar with the site or the concepts behind it at all, and need an introduction.

But I agree that to someone that tries to read the site frequently, the front page is pretty terrible.