I think a nice feature would be to allow sticky entries, ie. entries that stay first in the list for each category.
I tried just setting date out into the future as a workaround, but then the default page never shows new entries if you have more than half a dozen categories with "stickies".
If we could associate a static page with a category so that the static page appears first when viewing the associated category, that would work fine as well.
This is going to require a rework of the entry storage system.