Some categories are more important than others considering their content.
Trying to keep the /categories page as concise as possible, I’d like to configure the category_featured_topics setting per-category (i.e. ability to override the global setting per category).
For example, for some categories I’d show only 3 latest topics, whereas for others 6 or even 7.
Example
Setting value, from the top to the bottom: 2, 6, 2
I actually like this. We have several topics in a given month that we like to feature (at the same time); so a banner topic doesn’t make sense.
Sure we could “pin” them (or sticky them ;)), but I’m not a big fan of pinned topics. Plus having it live on the categories page only for a short while (and not affect the latest list) seems like a good idea to me too.