Very valid points here! I don't disagree. I'd just like to take those posts off the homepage and if you want to read about them, you can dive into the topic and read all about it.
If we had stickies as @donkeypong suggested with a welcome/getting started/intro that mentioned digging into that section, I think that still gets the job done without sacrificing some of the other mentioned benefits that could come from the proposal.
Good thoughts. Perhaps rather than the trending page showing all posts ranked in order of their trend it should show the top two or three posts in each category/tag ranked by order of trend. That would ensure more diversity on the trending page.
Yep. My proposal is that we get people to just choose those category/topics. So what you said, with the ability to choose those topics instead of them being chosen for you.