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need to feature items 2 3 years back.

In order to feature such posts, I simply categorized them into the
`featured` category and once I am done featuring them, I unchecked
them from the `featured` cat so I can have the room to feature new
ones.

This approach has multiple drawbacks.

Firstly, I cannot simply go pick a post and then categorize it under
`featured` and expect it to be appear on my `featured` zone!. I MUST
UNCHECK AT LEAST ONE OF THE EXISTING FEATURED POSTS. Why? Well, if I
got room to display 5 featured items, and I happen to just feature a
6th one. which 5 is to show in there?

Secondly, due to the unchecking, I can never build an archive of 'once
featured' or 'at least once featured' list of posts.

It seems to me that WordPress make a one heck of an assumption that
featured posts come from the latest posts! So, As you bring new posts
in it, you can simply keep on checking them into the `featured` posts,
and WP will nicely show them in your `featured items zone` in the
chronological order. This obviously kicks the 6th one out of the view,
keeping the latest 5 in the zone.

But, what if you pick one old post (from say 3 mts ago && you want
that to appear in that very same zone? Change the post date?

Let me quickly note here that the Sticky posts feature of WP won't
help here neither, cause they too require the maintenance of
'unsticking'. Sticks posts may help with the situation for one Zs and
two Zs but if you constantly feature items from the past, it won't
help at all.

I wish there was a special category, called FEATURED with an option to
change the base name  whereby WP manages the featured items using a a
different date based criteria.

So, Everytime an item is checked into that special `featured` WP
category, WP  keeps track of the date of this action into a database
field, called `last featured date` or something like that and when it
displays the items in the `featured` cat ( and all of its sub cats ),
it simply sort posts  using that date - instead of the post_created
date!

My question to you is that if there are slick solutions out there to
address this problem?