Confused w/ Hompage vs. Articles and Slider

The reading setting are backwards because of the home page template, try putting it on Front page displays “Your latest posts”

No joy. No matter what I do I can’t get the home page to be the home page. I’ve had similar problems with other themes. I’ve disabled all plugins and have reinitialized my database to start from scratch.

I’m about to give up on WordPress. I do DBA work all day for a living but I seem unable to get some basic love from WP.

Other suggestions?

You can try in this way:
Create an empty page, named “blog” e.g., and choose “blog” template.
In custom menu, you should have default home page and blog page both, so you now should have a Blog page with all posts without slider, and a standard Home with slider and all posts.
For the second step you need this child theme, download it and load it in your theme folder. Then, copy home.php from the original theme and put it in your child theme.
Now you need a little knowledge about php, if not proceed step by step.
Delete all sections after “slider section”, one by one and checking every time, e.g.:
Delete all of Categories Section and Articles Section.
You must be careful not to delete too much but if it happens it’s not a problem because you’re working on a child, I think you can delete till <!– End articles. –> more or less.
If you don’t have syntax errors, look if you have still something to delete, if you have errors, check if you delete too much out of the divs.
If this new template works, change the file name, newhome.php e.g.
Create a page called Home, and choose that template.
Remove standard Home from Menu.
I don’t know if it works, but you can try.

EDIT: In your new template, you must replace with this at the very beginning of the file:

<?php
/**
* Template Name: the name you choose
* Description: what the template do
*
* @since Leaf 1.0
*/