Dori,
I can appreciate your questions because I had been thinking about #4 and #5 for a while now.
I was thinking, on topic #5, what if you were to use the filtering options in the shortcode and hand-pick the featured listings to display them on the top of the page or on a separate page? It would be a manual effort but it could work. If you look into Visual Composer, you could do this with tabs or collapsible sections on the page.
I have additional suggestions if you would like to hear them. Drop me a note sometime jeffschodde [at] gmail [dot] com.
Cheers,
Jeff
