What was supposed to be contained in the loops just don’t show up…it’s like WP just ignores they’re even there…but as I said, as soon as I removed the custom field on those posts that was created by the plugin, all problems went away.
So, at least the solution to my personal problem on the homepage had to do with the “Stealth Publish” plugin, which looks not to be 100% compatible with 2.8. As soon as I removed the custom fields from those posts associated with this plugin, they appeared on the homepage as before.
I’d love someone to help with this as well. After clicking the register button, it would be great to log them in automatically and dump them on their edit profile page.