WordPress MU

what I do not understand is this:
wordpress is an amazing tool, which allows people with very little php and coding knowledge to build sites and blogs. mU seems like an equally useful tool at first, but it has a major weak spot which I am hoping someone here can help with. The lack of any useful home page theme.
This seems completely the opposite from the entire design and philosophy of wordpress.
All I am trying to do is:
create place for many blog authors to post articles all with common menu structure I added into the header.
I planned on using the default blog as a main listing for all other sub-blogs using the built in categories or links list in the sidebar, but the default home theme has no sidebar, I can not even find how to change the default theme. I would probably be content just setting some other wordpress theme as the defult for mU.
Hopefully this is simple to do and someone can help point me in the right direction.
thanks

99% of Wordpress will work on MU. Add that with the Sitewide Tags plugin from Donncha and you get pretty much anything you want with some template editing.

You have to do some work you know.

http://wpmututorials.com/

Although I appreciate the fast responses, they do not answer MY question.
1) There is no sidebar on the default page, instead it is a static html page with no way for me to work with it without hard coding solutions ( wordpress expert )
2) There is no way to change the default home theme from admin that I can find, to say for example use a standard theme already coded to work with sidebar and standard wordpress tags.
Why is that ?
it is almost as if a great tool was expanded on and made intentionally difficult to work with.

Go to SiteAdmin > Themes. Themes you upload need to be activate there first.

Don't activate the theme you intend to use on the main blog. Instead go to SiteAdmin > Blogs and selection Edit on the main blog. Tick the unactivated theme you want to use to make it avaiable under "Design" to the main blog only.

WordPress MU isn't for "users". The blogs provided by a WordPress MU installation are for users. The main install is a lot trickier because it requires a lot more work to administer and manage what could be a large number of users.

Remember, each of your users is relying on you to help solve "their" problems, keep their sites up and running, making sure all their data is backed up, etc. If you don't think you are capable of "setting up and configuring" a home page template then maybe this isn't for you.

Sorry to be so blunt, but this isn't an "out of the box" and "click a few buttons" blog hosting system here. Admittedly the amazing work of Donncha has made things a lot easier than it used to be but some level of tech savvy and development skills are always going to be required.

thank you, I appreciate the replies again. You can understand my confusion, as I have been using wordpress itself for years, which has been so brilliantly designed to allow both the non-web savy user and the programmer both to use and modify. I was under the assumption that wordpress MU would have followed that same principle.
There is so much potential in the open source community ...unfortunately it is still limited in most areas to the small percentage of people able to write their own code.
I am trying to help a non-profit make platform where their monthly article, which gets translated into 27 languages currently, can serve as a mutlilingual translation portal. So each language can take the original article, and using a translated admin interface in their own language, translate the article and place new content in the appropriate language blog.
This is not very complicated, and something which wordpress MU should be able to handle quite easily with existing structure.
Can I simply change the default HOME theme to any other standard wordpress theme ??

Can I simply change the default HOME theme to any other standard wordpress theme ??

There's HOME template and DEFAULT template. Both are changeable.

Wow, thanks Klarko. You are the first person to actually explain where to change the Main Blog theme.
I set it to a different theme than the MU Home one set by default, and that solved my problem. Typical wordpress sidebar back, and I can work with it.
Thank you !

path2u ...I think for your purpose you should use regular wordpress and a combination of the Categories as Subdomains plugin and a Language plugin.

As cafe said MU isn't for users. It's server level software. Normal folks might be able to get by with regular Wordpress on shared hosting or the one-click installs, but with MU you're expected to have a certain level of knowledge. I'm not saying you can't learn though.

I was originally thinking along those lines, but I needed something which provided me the level of separated user levels per blog, so each language can have its own team of translators. Now that I was able to switch the default theme, it should be pretty simple for me, as most wordpress themes include category lists in sidebar, which the home theme did not.
Now I just need to find the best language plugin as you said, which once again I am only concerned with the Interface translation, not the content itself as the translators will perform that aspect.
I am not the only person asking for the features, as several other threads have pointed out to me, however most of them have been left unresolved.