I cant test that anymore at the moment, since the problem has escalated to something way worse than that.
I have uninstalled all traces of w3 total cache, and still, my home page is STUCK. minified and cached. nothing will change the content of it, not even changing the "reading" options on wp-admin to make the home page a static page. whats being shown is a cached version of the paged, and I dont know how thats happening, its only the home page. i can even delete the index.php from my theme, nothing happens.