It's harder to get on the home page than it used to be, but not because point inflation. It's because there are more submissions than ever before, but still the same number of stories on the home page.
My theory is that it's because there's a limited supply of good-for-HN articles out there. But really we don't know. Also, those numbers are raw total submissions, with no attempt to control for dupes.
I also see a ton of upvoted stories on the front page with no comments. I always thought the focus of HN was the thoughtful conversations that took place around topics, not the accrual of fake internet points.
Apparently, ranking is only a function of the time since submittal and the # of points. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted.
If you read the very next paragraph, you'll see that it's based on other factors too:
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.
Is this not normal? It seems to be the default for me. I was reading HN for a while before I even realized there was a different 'front' page. 'front' doesn't appear as an option in the menu.