Drupal 8.x

I am using Drupal 8 and want to create a custom home page, with a slideshow, content teasers, a news feed, main navigation, footer navigation, and a login area. 

The basic content page doesn't really give me those kind of options. Is there a "best practice" or best method I should be using to do so?

Should I be using Views? Panels? Blocks? Custom templating in Twig? What method do you use and why?

Any answers / help would be greatly appreciated!

I'm sure this is something simple, but I'm starting to transition our D7 custom apps, mostly CRUD, to D8.4 and am having trouble grasping how to pass a Link object correctly in a table theme.

I don't know the best way to achieve a result so I will provide the scenario and ask for HOW-TO advice. When the view displays, I ultimately need it to group my person content type into 6 rows/sections.

On the horns of a dilemma. Have a slideshow using views. It works great in preview. When I place block, no slideshow? Anybody have any  thoughts? I have another live site and a slideshow is working. I compared views side by side from both sites. They are exactly the same. So close, yet so far away. Both sites are running 8.4.3

My Goal: Create a content type called "Event" for weekly recurring events.  For example, a weekly conference call or meeting that is always on Monday at 4:00 PM.

The one dilemma that I ran into is getting the time to display the way I want.  I would prefer it to appear as such:

4:00 pm

I did discover how to do this using "manage display" and PHP, so that's solved.  Although while editing the event, the field still asks the user to enter a date and a time down to the seconds.  I don't want that.

In Drupal 8, is it possible to deploy the block layout and settings (admin/structure/block) from a dev to production site using the Features module?