Agreed. Especially with the speed at which the 'new' page scrolls by the chances of making it to the homepage are relatively slim (unless of course you want to game the system but that's not ethical).
A potential way of displaying this would be to simply interleave the home and the new page.
I definitely agree about the speed things are going down on the new page. We got a post for the review of our website (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075533) and it was out of the page in less than a hour.
I think that a better way to handle it would be to allow users to whitelist/blacklist users, and set up a separate "incoming" section, sorted by recency. Users that you already know, you put on the whitelist and all of their links stay on the page. Blacklisted users never go to the "incoming" section.
You could also put "degrees of trust" on the whitelist and have links from users that are on the whitelist of your whitelisted users.
A potential way of displaying this would be to simply interleave the home and the new page.