Two columns on frontpage with a CCK form and a node list
Administering panels has a huge overhead, however, since panels are highly cached there is actually a performance boost to use them over plain blocks. It's discussed in this article, Assembling Pages with Drupal.

If this is some type of survey or questionaire you can make the node edit form the front page by using using the site configuration feature assigning the font page path. With Views you then can create two blocks that you use to show on the right column in either the block administration page or the panels administration page. However, for surveys the standard is to use the Webform module.