I'm not aware of any obvious reasons, I'd really like to read something about it as the main posts contains no reasons or anything related to that.
Here's one reason to upgrade: XF2 came out over a year ago and because of that, XF1.5 is becoming EOL in a few months and losing security updates by end of year. We should not be running an abandoned engine. So it's not really a choice whether or when to upgrade, we do this to keep this thing running at all.
So you're saying that the Home button has just no reason to be there? Why to have it in first place?
Quite correct. It's gone.
Meanwhile having a decent Home landing page with all these functionalities that you think I haven't explored yet might be a nice feature for everyone to see what's going on instead of having only half-dead support threads with stupid and uninteresting questions no one really feels like answering.
Such a landing page does not exist. We're not a server list and we don't have many events. We have tutorials in specific boards - that's where all the information is or should be. No reason to replicate that on a new "home" page. There is another attempt at explaining "OTS" to new people (that is docs.otland.net) but it's in very early stages. If it gets anywhere (not many people wanted to help expand it) then it may be featured in the menu.
Now, what should we focus on you'd say "to keep it alive"? Well, code, I think. And that is on GitHub and not here. Here we talk about it but there's not much to talk about if nobody wants to share/develop serious code.
I hope that helps explain why some changes happen and some don't.