I’m also one for keeping things as clean & simple as possible, for my sanity =]
For me, the only benefit is that it would let me have an /podcast page with shownotes (e.g. myblog.com/podcast/episode-1) in one place, rather than on a separate blog. That said, I wouldn’t want for these to be sent out to my email subscribers, and I don’t trust myself to remember the workaround for doing this every time(!).
I was looking at # tags to categorise posts earlier, which I think I’m going to use soon to start organising my posts.
All of that to say… I’m OK with the way things are at the mo (i.e. root-path).
EDIT(ed again): Whoops, I clearly skimmed over the last part of your post, @matt, I second @000… a static homepage would be pretty cool. There’s a reasonable chance I would make use of this.