As others have said, the big problem with Featured Articles is that, rather than being treated like articles which are truly informative, well-written and well-organized, they basically just get a "this is a nice article" stamp on them and, well, that's about it save for the chance of getting them on the frontpage. I feel that featured articles should be treated as ones which have basically achieved a "this really can't get any better than it is" status and therefore should be locked with any changes made either by the editor(s) responsible for making it a featured article in the first place, or done via the talk pages on a well-informed basis.
One big problem with featured articles as a concept on Wikipedia, though, is that they generally contradict what Wikipedia is trying to accomplish. They aren't done by tons of users over the course of years, but are almost always achieved either by one single user or by two or three working closely together on a subject they genuinely know a lot about through actual research, and therefore these articles do not attain their status via the principle of "everyone can edit," but on the basis of "one, two or three smart persons have created/edited this article and no one has come along to make it suck yet."
There are probably a fair amount of people who might be willing to take a shot at creating/editing articles and striving for featured status, but who don't feel like it since it'd just decay under 30+ anonymous individuals throughout successive years.
This post has been edited by Mister Die:
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