I’m finding that the categories view offers me a cleaner (== more organized, understandable) “first look” of the forum than the default view (latest).
Questions:
See the “Read me first for admins (and moderators)” page under “Set the Homepage” (no deep links to headers until an upcoming version of Discourse, 
).
(For non-admins/moderators, that says:
Set the Homepage
By default your homepage is a simple list of the latest posts.
We strongly recommend sticking with this homepage for small and medium communities until you start getting lots of new topics every day.
You can change the homepage to the Categories list by editing top menu in the Basic Setup site settings. Change it from the default of
latest|new|unread|top|categories
to
categories|latest|new|unread|top
That is, move categories from the far right to the far left – that leftmost top menu item is your default homepage.
While “categories” gives a cleaner look, I think that, for everyday usage, “latest” is more useful for now, as we have only 1-10 updated topics per day that fit on the first page. But I have no problem personally with changing the home page, as I can just sit in whatever view I like.
I agree with @ktl. As soon as the site gets lots of traffic to multiple categories (Q&A, Data Management, Announcements, perhaps even categories for other parts of LSST and science collaborations), then that’s the time to switch to the categories homepage as you suggest @mjuric.
And don’t forget the keyboard shortcuts (see under the ‘hamburger menu’). gc will take you to the categories view from anywhere. Similar shortcuts exist for ‘unread’ and ‘latest’ views.