Limit categories and posts on home page

My experience with WordPress has only been a few months and I am struggling with how best to organized content before content gets the upper hand.

My question: It would seem to me that if ‘Uncategorized’ category is *not* checked, but another category is which does *not* have ‘Uncategorized” as parent, then posts should not appear on the home page, but only on the category page when the category for which the post is associated is selected from the category menu. But, that is not the way it works. Default means default.

So, what plug-ins for WP2.2 will give me control over what is displayed on the home page?

What I really (might) like is to have the most recent posts in various categories displayed, with a link at the bottom of the post “more posts in this category”. Whatever solution would need to be compatible with WP-Sticky.