Homepage initially inaccessible to anonymous users

I used the regular GUI installation process to install the distribution: I unpacked the tarball into a directory visible to my web server (http://localhost/_w/redhen_demo/), went to the homepage of the new website, chose "RedHen CRM Demo" as the installation profile, and proceeded from there. Everything went smoothly.

I created an example event, and published it to the homepage. I set permissions so anonymous users can view events. But after I logged out, each time I tried to go to the homepage as an anonymous user, the site kept returning to the login screen (http://localhost/_w/redhen_demo/user/login?destination=/_w/redhen_demo/), and the error message "Access denied. You must login to view this page."

Not being familiar with RedHen, I suspected that perhaps events are not supposed to be viewable. I enabled all "Access RedHen..." permissions for anonymous users. That did not solve the problem.

So I created a new content type, created an instance of it, published it to the homepage, and verified that anonymous users can view them. That did not solve the problem.

I assumed that the default homepage (Configuration > Site information > Default front page) had not been set to anything but the usual "node" (i.e., blank) value, since the destination path in my example (/_w/redhen_demo/) did not contain anything unusual. But I checked the setting, and sure enough it was set to "redhen". Deleting that fixed the problem.

In the documentation, I did not see any warning of this. So I recommend that the maintainers of this distribution make it clear upfront that people using it will need to make that change if they want the usual node path to serve as the homepage.

Also, what is the purpose of initially setting it to "redhen"?