Don't use the "new posts" thing on the main home page. We've had issues with it for quite a while, and frankly, it's never worked correctly. If you want to look for new posts, then just navigate to the board index first, and then click on the "View new posts" button at the top right. That works much better. Our lead web guru, Fox, no longer plays SWMs, so he hasn't been working on this site as much anymore, which is perfectly fine. I'm learning as I can, and working on things, but bugs like how the new posts thing on the front page works is still something I haven't quite figured out. Perhaps if I can get it to work, I'll just take it off there altogether.
And the simple fact of the matter is, this forum has a moderator staff. The moderators/admins have their own separate forum(s) to discuss things as necessary. Honestly, it's not that unusual for the discussion "behind the scenes" to be more than what can be seen by the general users, because many time, the moderators and admins of a website are the most frequent users as well. That's part of how they got to those positions.
If you are disappointed by the lack of topics that the general users can participate in, then start some yourself.
And as for the login stuff....we've consistently had issues with the "keep me logged in" feature since we got hacked back in April. No clue what the problem is, and it's just something we have to live with for now, unfortunately. But I highly doubt we would ever change the forums so that you don't have to log-in at all. Having a log-in is part of how we maintain control over the site, and how we monitor traffic as well. In addition, there are some sections of the site that we would like people to become members of the site in order to view. The hope is that if you spend the time/energy to sign up for the site in order to look at some sections of the forums, then perhaps you will spend time looking at or contributing other sections as well.
We'll certainly take your suggestions into consideration, but to be honest, most of them are things we've already discussed in the past and have decided there is either nothing we can do about it, or the site is set up that way because that's how we want it.