For myself the Home page is eye candy for the forums.. My forums have always been the focal point of any of my communities.. But i literally have 50 to 100 guests in my largest forum at any given time of the day or night, Unfortunately the members actually only have a small handful of members online at the same time.. Most my guests are surfing the CMS portions of my site.. thread reply's give my home page the appearance of an active site.. Which it is, but this really works in my favor because people who read our articles but never visit the forum sometimes register to comment on an article.. I just think it promotes registrations to a point that seperate comments would not.. Funny but my members never read the home page content they go straight to the forums and would never leave a comment on the CMS portions making my site look dead to guests.. Thats my experience with vB4 cms
On the other hand i also have another site using vB4 as the forum and Joomla as the CMS.. The site is not bridged and registration on the Joomla site is disabled. We publish several original articles and allow guests to leave comments on the Joomla portion. I can tell you from my own experience that on this site i have two distinct sets of Visitors, one set uses the Home page to read News, Articles Blogs and Commentaries, and the other seems to visit the forum exclusively and in some cases dont even know we have a home page.