The changes to Observable are great, and of course everyone will have different preferences, so apologies if this is just noise, but I really miss the featured collections.
With the recent changes, users now have 8 notebooks under quickstart that we can either toggle on or off. Before, we had a quickstart collection and a bunch of other collections of cool notebooks. Just a few minutes ago I went to grab the URL for one that used to be featured, but couldn’t find a way to navigate to it. I recall the author’s handle and so pulled up his profile, then clicked through his notebooks till I found it. [Incidentally, a keyword search for this notebook didn’t return it in the first two pages of returns]. If I didn’t have all this context to work with, I may not have found it (a once featured notebook).
Observablehq still has collections, but to get to these I also have to know about the concept of collection, and think that the observablehq.com site has an observablehq user that would avail of these collections. This is a lot of head-work for the uninitiated, and a lot of great examples and tutorials that you [the Observable team] have been curating that are now relatively buried.
So again - with all realization that all users have different preferences and knowing you folks are deliberate and amazingly skilled, here’s my short appeal to bring back the concept of featured collections to Home.
[And while I’m here, I’ll toss in my request to looks for ways to help users just more directly to the ‘recently published’ feed, which once was one click away and now is two].
With sincere admiration and 
!