Having bits of the content from Pages appear on the front page

It will not, normally.
Pages are not meant to be displayed more than ONE in one page.

Hmmm… I feel like there’s gotta be a way with php or something to pull that text into the front page.

If there really isn’t, maybe I should fake it some other way.

I didn’t say it’s impossible – what I said is WP doesn’t work like that. There is no ready-made (or simple) code to display excerpts or “before-more” portions of a WP Page. (The “more” tag doesn’t even work on Pages…)

If you have a home.php template in your theme – a lot of things can be coded into it, either manually or with plugins.
To get ideas… ??
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Template_Tags/query_posts#Parameters
https://guff.szub.net/2005/01/27/get-a-post/

This seems to work. I found it in one of the links you posted:

<?php
query_posts(‘pagename=Your Page Name’);
…
<?php the_excerpt(”); ?>
yada yada

so thanks!