That does happen often, but what to nominate/vote for is at each mod’s discretion.
For example, I prefer to see the featured slot go to more recent images by artists who are still active and who are members of the site. So if you see a featured image that was only uploaded a few weeks prior (like >>2150503 or >>2175695), that’s often (but not always) my nomination.
@KW117
Staff members can nominate one image for featuring, and can vote on which of the nominees should be featured. Every 3 days Mildgyth counts the votes and then the winner is featured. Every one of the 700+ featured images went through that process, aside from the special pics like the collabs and a few that were featured immediately for special events.
Most of the time we try to pick artists who:
are still active
are Derpi members
haven’t been featured before, or haven’t been featured within the last year