Hey Geoffrey,
Firstly, I do apologize if my response doesn't sound helpful but I was trying to understand what you are trying to achieve here. If I do sound offensive, I apologize for that.
By the way, may I know what are you trying to achieve here? Are you only trying to render the featured section? The reason I am asking is because we have a showcase module that allows you to render posts in such layout without any tweaks at all. You just need to publish the module.
If you want to use the front page layout, you would then need to feature all your posts and edit the file /components/com_easyblog/themes/wireframe/blogs/latest/default.php and remove the codes below:
[gist]
<div itemscope itemtype="
http://schema.org/Blog" class="eb-posts <?php echo $this->isMobile() ? 'is-mobile' : '';?>" data-blog-posts>
<?php echo $this->output('site/blogs/latest/posts', array('posts' => $posts, 'return' => $return, 'currentPageLink' => $currentPageLink)); ?>
</div>
[/gist]