Tom and I (and presumably Brad and Tom as a result) have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with Rob's request to prevent posts from showing up on the main page.
I mean, it makes complete sense, but it never occurred to use that someone might want to do this. We've run across it in another area though - the photoblog secret project that we're working on. When a publisher lashes a whole whack of thumbnails stuff to a blog post, it doesn't always make sense for the entire post to show up on the main page.
We get around this with text posts by using excerpts (I hate them :), but you can't really excerpt an image [mumble] - at least not efficiently. Thumbnails of 100 images[Mumble, mumble] is a pretty sad summary of the photoalbum thing.
But we're working on it - we've dubbed it "Bubbling" as in "bubbling a post up through the categories and onto the main-page". Sooner, rather than later, publishers will be able to set global and local variables that allow them to determine what bubbles up, when and why.
Trust me - this makes a lot of sense given the range of features that we've slated for the next few months. From a content management perspective, from a "manage my stuff" perspective - its completely mandatory.