Managing featured content the drupal way
If your goal is to make a simple workflow for your clients, you have to take into account your clients' general ability to use the Web.  What is easy for one client may be very difficult for another, so it's hard to say which workflow is superior.  For example, when I set up a Drupal website for a CS professor, very little customization was required; on the other hand, when I set up Drupal for my grandfather, I had to do a lot of workflow customization to remove options and simplify things.

As far as easily allowing content to be "Featured," I usually set it up with Flags.  This is a pain to set up but is very simple for end users.  Basically, you have a flag for each section you want to feature.  This flag should allow you to flag nodes of the content type you want to feature.  Then you create a rule using the Rules module that trims the flag to 1; this means that only one piece of content can have the flag at any given time (assuming you only want to flag one piece of content per section).  Then users with the appropriate permissions can simply flag the content that they wish to feature and it will automatically be featured.  Advanced users probably don't need this, but for users with limited computer skills it may be helpful.

As for your concerns about excessive markup, Drupal in general generates lots of wasteful markup.  There are solutions like the Fences module and Semantic Views to try to slim it down, but in general I would not worry about this; you would have to have a huge amount of traffic before the time you spent trying to slim down the markup paid off.