Best Practice for Displaying Categorized Posts on Front Page

You can use WP_Query in your template to select groups of posts by type, category, tag, custom taxonomy, meta field, etc., and create additional loops:

<?php   
$news = new WP_Query("post_type=mynews&posts_per_page=1");
while($news->have_posts()) : $news->the_post();
    the_title();
endwhile;

$events = new WP_Query("cat=2&posts_per_page=3");
while($events->have_posts()) : $events->the_post();
    the_title();
endwhile;

// etc..

It’s up to you how to best organize your content in a way that makes sense as far as how you use your taxonomies and types.