thank you for the details and apologies for the late reply.
please note that the settings in the template to hide the component, only refers to 'featured articles' pages, which is used by joomla as default for the frontpage. your frontpage though is not a 'featured articles' page but a 'single article' page.
so you would have to go to > menus > topmenu > home... and change the type of that menu item.