Why would you want to "hide a featured article" instead of removing its featured status

cause we use featured articles for the homepage for building the homepage, an homepage on more pages, at the same time we use mod_articles_category and other com_content modules for making the homepage a bit richer, but we display them just on the homepage itself not on the secondary pages.
So we need to keep featured articles tag, but we need to avoid mod_articles_category from showing duplicated content in homepage. It is a very common issue with joomla, how to avoid duplicated content in homepage when you display several blocks of contents, and filtering mod_articles_category and other com_content articles for hiding a certain amount of featured articles would solve the problem.
Let's say I show 15 featured articles by page in featured articles homepage, I just need to hide 15 featured articles to mod_articles_category and I don't have the issue anymore. Of course there are more complex and refined ways to solve this issue, but I think this one can be quite effective and simple. But if there are better ways to solve the homepage duplicated issues just using standard joomla features, please let me know.

For clarifying: I want mod_articles_category to hide just the first N featured articles, so the idea is to add the possibility to limit to N the hide featured articles feature already supported by the module