OK! My lunch break is just about voer so I have to call it quits for the moment, but the short answer seems to be - there is no easy way to make a feed on the front page that will report every new article on the site. I have found a way to list all the category feeds on the front page, but the feeds themselves remain separate.

There may be a more complicated way to make it go, but I haven't found it yet. So right now you have one feed per updatable page - each writing category, the front page and the news page all have their own separate rss feeds attached. I'll keep poking.