Featured Content and customization of Category Pages

We need to be able to add Featured Content to Category pages and also to have context-aware widgets that surface targeted topic or links only within that Category.

We are a large-scale B2B technology company with multiple product lines, and the user experience is very challenging to support those without being able to modify the Category pages more and target content to localized topics/content/announcements, etc.

We are willing to try custom CSS but prefer not to.