I have various products for all these different scenarios. SuperGrid comes with templates for the the database page itself but also for article blocks (which can show on any page). SuperGrid only works for articles (“Pages records”) though. I have a matching product for forum blocks called SuperTopics.
And I also have a product called SuperBlocks which only works for blocks, but for almost all content types. It’s well suited for a homepage combining content from various parts of the website.
No, you wouldn’t want to hide the article page. It’s where are ALL the articles will live, while pulling from that page through blocks will only show a few records, e.g. the latest ones. As said earlier, my suggestion is to start building this stuff first and see how it’s going, before thinking about applying additional products to make it look better.