Why do so many speculate about them? You have probably overestimated this. It is really not a huge topic of discussion except among the non-calvinists who want to use it as a basis for rejecting other things.
No, it is many Calvinists who are always trying to rub this particular point in people's faces, as if just for the fact that they know people don't like it, it seems sometimes.
My point is that there are clear verses that solve your mystery.
Preaching the gospel is not what matters most. Pleasing God is. That is accomplished in part by preaching the gospel but it must also be a right gospel. Doctrine matters.
But this one point of doctrine is speculatory and not satisfactorily shown to be right according to the Bible in its contexts. The Bible seems to say a lot of things, and every group (including outright false ones) is saying it definitely teaches their distinctive doctrine.
As for the foreknowing issues, Scott just answered that pretty well. And even that explanation still does not do justice to the difference between the realms. So I do not argue about foreknowledge, and do not see it as leaving people without hope. People live in time, not in eternity (Origen taught that man preexisted in God's realm, and this may have helped influence Augustine), and even from your point of view, you treat it as if man is at one point condemned, and then we preach the Gospel to him, he accepts it, and is then saved. The two positions are
in practice the same.
NE wants to be saved. They are all clueless. God gives the clue to only a select number of people, willfully choosing to bypass others. In your system, it's not exactly that people don't want hope, it's that the non-elect don't even know they can have it... They can't even want hope.