I think having the summary of the message also confuses things a bit. You only get a glimpse of the topic, and sometimes things can meander in a thread. My 2 cents (and by the way, I really appreciate the thoughts and efforts in improving the site) is if there's an infrequent visitor to the site, then they don't quite know what people are responding to.
If you want to include the summary of the topic, and have it display on the landing page, then why not the first post of that thread? And then if you showed what the number of responses are to that topic, then you can see which are the "hot topics" currently on the site.
Lastly, I think the other thing is I think the font may be too small...
Notice this, too...
With the concept of only the most recent post in a thread being shown, it is too easy to never see the older ones, unless you show them all.
E.g. I just posted 3 messages in this thread. But when I go to the home page now, my posts about the colors and the arrangement will never get seen, unless someone happens to deliberately go into that thread and read it intentionally.
By listing all the messages, yeah, this thread does appear to dominate Help & Suggestions today, but isn't that appropriate if it's really that active? If ppl want to see older inactive threads, you can scroll down and see them in the "Threads in this Topic" section.
Just brainstorming...
