I would like to incorporate small snippets of the latest blogs with their cover images on the homepage. A 'read more' link will then link to the respective blog post.

I understand that your latest blog module is not able to include any image.

After doing a thorough search on joomla blog components, only one out there is capable of doing this, but I have tried it and it slows down the loading of the entire homepage. I suppose this is because it loads all the contents (plug-ins, video clips) from the blog posts instead of just the necessary snippets onto the homepage.

I hope that you have this capability for RSBlog soon so that I can try it out.

Have you considered creating a template override for the latest blog posts module to accommodate your needs ?