This can't be overstated, I find that when building a homebrew world, I tend to fill it with all sorts of hooks and themes. What happens is my players jump around from one interesting locale to the next, but lack the drive of a "north star" goal as Sly puts it.
My first time DMing Curse of Strahd was a big learning experience; simply having the goal to kill Strahd from the get-go meant players started sessions with more focus and were more committed to their characters and the story.
In my experience, having stuck with CR religiously, you find yourself with tense, anyone-could-die sessions - against a pack of wolves from a random encounter. And then you have easy, bring it home encounters - against the arc's big bad. It takes control of the fight's narrative stakes out of the DM's hands, and makes it more-or-less random.
I want to stress that it was fun to play this way, but eventually myself and my players longed for more dramatic final encounters, and so I had to homebrew creatures.