Currently, we have hundreds of projects that do not have people trained to make a proper homepage. Most of them simply copy the designs proposed by other larger wikis, and adapt them as best as they can.
During the makeover project called Desktop-Improvements, no one has considered that the homepage has to be designed. However, a new design needs a new homepage.
The homepage is, despite denials from the redesign team, the most viewed page in any wikimedia project. It is also by far the most viewed single page in most of the world's languages that have an Internet presence. Only a minority of languages have any other website with more views than the main Wikipedia page in their language. The design has to take this into account, and make a proposal in line with the overall proposed design.
This proposal has to be easily exportable to any Wikimedia project that wants to do it, leaving in the hands of those few projects that do have human resources the possibility of making their own designs, however obsolete they may seem to us.
Contrary to what has been proposed so far, this project cannot be postponed until the end of the process. Changing bricks but not thinking that the building needs a door until the end is bad practice. The house may be beautiful inside, but we don't have a door to enter it.
This project should propose a simple, effective design, in line with the aesthetics of the new Vector, scalable and easily copyable, with its own css rules used as templatestyle (bearing in mind that most projects do not have anyone who can change common.css and that WMF does not have the staff to deal with 800 projects individually).