The goal of the product is to make your phone feel more alive with content from the people you care about while still allowing you to efficiently perform all the typical tasks you use your phone for. The navigation model is a bit different than what people have become accustomed to, so some confusion is very understandable; however, we tried very hard to make access to any task just as efficient on Home as any other launcher. Getting to any app is just one gesture away: swipe up to launcher; swipe right to the last app; or double tap the home button to bring up the switcher. As user feedback comes in we'll continue to tune our model to try and achieve a nice balance between surfacing social content and completing tasks.
Home was designed and engineered by a pretty small team with a goal of releasing a high quality, performant, and beautiful product. To ensure our bar was met, we tried to narrowly focus on doing just a few things but doing them well for the first release. Of course the trade off here is that some features that people value are missing. I hope this first version will be judged on the execution of what we did include as we continue to fill in the gaps in future releases.
For anyone who has checked it out so far Thank you! I'm looking forward to making the experience something you'll love.