[jamesaguilar]

You're forgetting a few properties of the new landing page. The image is at its full size, or at least at a much larger size, which is what most people want to see when they arrive at a landing page. In the old version, only a tiny thumbnail was visible. Many pages also don't have the image visible at the top, so this makes it so the image is always visible. So there are a few things that at least argue in favor of the new version.

Scrolling versus paging is a personal preference thing. I don't know the rationale behind that, but I know that some people prefer the smoothness of a scroll over the pages.