That makes sense, one fix could be to show more avatars in your theme for this layout instead of the single, large avatar → 
For inspiration, we have a mixture of various layouts at Discourse customers | Discourse - Civilized Discussion, and another option seems to be Featured Topics + Categories (see MS Society, Glamour).
Without custom devs, you can still get a lot done with our official theme-components. For example, Homepage Feature could be a nice addition to any existing layout.
Finally, there is the category boxes with topics option in the wizard:
