I have read SmileyCat’s entry “Your Home Page is NOT Your Website” and agree with what he wrote.
I’ve been working at company that generated dozens of articles per day, and in order to promote that content, they put dozens of links on the home page. This made the content linked from the home page the only content relevant on site, while thousands of articles have been hidden in the sections and sub-sections pages.
This generated close to zero motivation for the site’s audience to click on a section title and look for interesting articles on that section page.
And with so many links on the home page, 95% of the users began to look only at the top articles on the page.
I think that a site with a lot of content need to motivate and educate the users to go to the section that is containing the information that they are looking for.