This is a strange hill to die on. For one thing, nobody was really focusing on how bad it was. It's power level was barely even mentioned and you dumped several paragraphs trying to refute it, when it wasn't even the point of the post.
Anyway, guess I'll follow suit.
I wasn't playing that long ago, but the wiki concurs with what I've heard that Serrated Arrows was included in tournament decks at the time because wotc instituted a rule forcing players to use a certain number of cards from the set - not exactly a vote of confidence in the playability of the cards when they're being mandated. The wiki also implies that memory lapse wasn't really considered good until sometime later, though I have no idea how true that is. It's hard for me to say exactly what the power level of the set at the time was, but compared to cards in the sets surrounding it, it doesn't exactly look stellar to me.
For commander purposes, though, it's certainly among the least played sets, and that's a lot easier to verify. Looking at most-played cards on EDHrec, there are only 3 in the set that garner more than a rounded-down 0% usage, which is exceedingly low - the only real set I've found that beats that number is Arabian, but that's presumably because the cards are ludicrously expensive (pretty sure Old Man of the Sea would have more than 59 inclusions if he wasn't $600...). Fallen empires beats it in terms of "lowest usage % for the most-played card in the set" with High Tide vs Merchant Scroll, but it's also got a lot more 1%ers, and is also a famously weak set. To compare it to a more modern set that gets a lot of flack for being weak, Dragon's Maze, is a joke. I'm not going to bother counting how far the 1%+ cards go in dragon's maze, but it's gotta be at least 50 or so. Even if you compare the raw numbers, despite DGM having all multicolor cards, DGM is still crushing homelands. Mercadian masques, also famously weak, but also thrashes it. I mean, look at homelands' number 8 card - Truce. That's the 8th most popular card in the set, by use%. That is so embarrassing.
It's super weird to me to pull out something like Leeches when you're trying to find evidence of the set's power. Sure, it's unique, but so what? Nobody said the set wasn't unique, they said it wasn't powerful, and that's pretty objectively true. A 6/2 for 4? Again, so what? Hungry Mist is a terrible card. I assume you're talking about Dark Maze, which not only cost 5 mana for a 4/5 but could only attack ONCE. That's so unbelievably bad, again I don't understand why you'd bring it up to try to defend the power level of the set. Alliance had overpowered cards? My dude, EVERY set has overpowered cards compared to homelands.
That doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad set. I'm not going to say someone is wrong for loving homelands - if anything, I think that's great. Too many people are attracted to raw power in this game. If you wanna argue "homelands = good" because it has interesting design or flavor or whatever, be my guest. But that doesn't mean the cards in the set are powerful, because they just aren't. If you order all the sets by power level, homelands is going to end up pretty close to the bottom, and that's just a fact.
, plus two of the best commander counterspells printed to date. 
