I believe it’s because you need to establish an account before the other buttons show you what you want to look at.
One of the reasons I bought the site was because I believed I could make it more user friendly in such aspects. Once you are logged in as a user, those things become available to you, so you hit the site and go straight to what you need / want.
I seem to remember that being an issue for me to change, where people are taken to a user area for that stuff.
I’m still looking at it, so I don’t have a definitive answer right now.