1. The standards of what makes it to the front page are basically `whatever this, a community of mostly intellectuals and entrepreneurs, likes at any given time'. The admins' role is just to step in when things get abusive.
2. Now is not the time for these meta-discussions.
It's not written; it is just how these voting-based sites (HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow) work.
You appear to be familiar with this: `On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.'
If a particular story meets that, upvote. If it does not, and is severely against it, flag it and move on.
As for getting flooded with Steve posts a couple days ago: we are humans here too, and many of the people here would say that they lost a hero of this crowd. A lot of people needed a bit of time of mourning; that's okay once in a while.
2. Now is not the time for these meta-discussions.
3. You were off-topic. (So am I, admittedly.)