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There is definitely no need to strive for more internal links pointing from your home page unless your internal pages are suffering from being "orphaned" (not linked to from anywhere) or having very few internal / external links pointing to them. You definitely don't need 1,700 links pointing out from your home page and it's doubtful the number of links on any one page is used as a ranking factor of any particular significance. The goal should be to pass PageRank to important parts of the website and aid usability, so if 24 links is doing that job for you, then 24 links is doing that job right.