It started with this Design Shack article.
After much discussion, design ideas were collected together at the start of this TxPcom home page thread. There was an intermediate attempt at home page copy and then this wiki relaunch start page was created. (Note this has changed a lot since the original, as have most links that follow).
At the same time, this home page copy text was an attempt to summarize the wishes of the community as expressed in previous threads and the TxPcom home page thread mentioned above.
A little later, there was a new attempt at home page copy but please note that page right now is really 2 or 3 versions in one. One version can be seen in Destry's wireframe. A similar version can be seen in Dave's demo which has the added bonus of a carousel of 5 pieces of extra content.
After some disagreement regarding blurb versus factual content, the Reasons To Try idea emerged which can be seen in Peter's version. Other ideas include Reasons Not To Try; keeping copy to a bare minimum to give the impetus to dig deeper; getting rid of Michelangelo and Moleskine and using more direct text such as these WordPress examples:
Blogging is too hard. Through WordPress we’ve enabled millions of people to effortlessly publish to the web. Now we want to enable millions more.
and also
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
Also, rather similar to the carousel, have 5 key points appear randomly on page refresh or with a button press, for Reasons To Try and/or Reasons Not To Try.