Here’s another opinion.
Maybe you should take a short survey on a forum structure, or similar. Why? For example, the only tools I use here are the magnifier icon (to search my queries) and in the menu I use Latest, New and Unread. When I post new topic, I care where to post it, and that is my only interaction with categories.
I never use home page, or browse categories. So, I doubt users care at all where they can find an answer, and it may turn out that it matters only to mods (devs are rare here anyway to care, I guess).
If I wasn’t clear then, I meant this is due to mods great job here at first (thank you!), but with note that users are great too, much better then I’ve seen elsewhere.