Steven Zahm@ Mark
RE: As far as I can tell, the Category Homepage addon you suggested is only able to display one category on a page.
It does not display anything in fact. This only allows you to choose a page which a category link should resolve to filtered by the selected category. I think that filtered bit is the part that is not making it work the way you need. I now think this addon is close but not exactly what you need. I think a simple change is all that is required to tweak it to meet you needs. I’d be willing to log in to your site real quick and make the change to find out :)
I think I perhaps was not understanding correctly the desired results. I think the perhaps the simplest solution is going to be the easiest.
On your recreation landing page, instead of using the links for the Connections categories using the shortcode you manually link to the correct pages. eg. add “Martial”, highlight it in the edit and click the link button and choose the base text page. You will then be able to use the featured/free shortcodes without the page being filtered by a category.
The downside is that you will have to maintain these links manually which might not be a huge issue if the categories will mostly remain static.
It does look like you may have already thought of this based on the “Recreation Categories” section on the pages.