For some time now featured articles have been promoted at an average rate exceeding one per-day. The undeniable consequence of this is that unless the rate of FA promotions drops off most featured articles will *never* make it to the main page. I see no reason to expect the promotion rate to fall, an several arguments why we should expect it to increase.
Yet, being featured on the main page is still cited by users as a big motivator behind their work on featured articles.
There is a simple measure that we could take which would substantially reduce this gap: We could regularlly run two featured articles on the main page like we are doing today.
By doing so we could also have more flexibility in our choices. When two interesting things fall on a single day, we could possibly run both. We could run similar articles for comparison, or dramatically different articles for contrasting.
With the order randomization that we're using for today's two articles we could compare differential click through rates and learn more about what people will click on. We could offer readers additional choices. To me this seems like a lot of advantages, at the cost of a little less attention on a single article.
(When we're done with this discussion we could move onto the fact that both of today's articles are hard-full-protected and how nice it would be if we were using revision flagging with display-flagged instead...)