Filtering product displays

Hey Nick -

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how designers can implement designer-specified filters in product displays. I have setup filters. I understand that I can use the Filter module to expose those filters to end users to set or deselect them. What I am missing is how to set a filter for a product list based upon a custom field without placing the filter module onto the screen.

The options I'm seeing:
1) Implement the Filter Module with it's default filter set to the desired subset of products and then CSS display:none the module.
2) Adapt the code of a view to hard code in the filter criteria.
3) Create extra categories and manage manually place products that meet the filter into these extra categories so that menu items can display a filtered list by selecting a pre-filtered category.
4) Configure a stored/canned search and adapt the search results page to display as a product list.

All of these seem a bit messy and not very straightforward.

Am I missing something about how to associate a filter to a Hikashop content module / Hikashop options?

Same question for a Product Listing menu item / Hikashop options?

The demo shows filtering products to just those that are "Featured" but it looks like there is no Featured attribute in either the Product table or as a custom field - that this is being simulated by doing a "most recent" sort of the products in a category. Is this correct? If so, what would be the best way to add a filter to show only "Featured" when displaying various categories?

Thanks!