Steps to reproduce the issue

Create two or more articles and flag as featured articles
Set home page to display featured articles
Set the order of featured articles by the Ordering column. Articles are uncategorized

Expected result

Featured articles should display in the order specified

Actual result

Featured articles not displaying the the order specified. Seems to be using a reverse date entered order instead.

System information (as much as possible)

Windows 10
IIS 10
PHP 5.4.17
MySQL 5.7

Additional comments

In components/com_contents/models/featured.php, getListQuery(), confirmed that $categoryOrderby is set to 'order'.

This line passes it in here:
$primary = ContentHelperQuery::orderbyPrimary($categoryOrderby);

The problem is, this method returns an unexpected value (file is: components/com_contents/helpers/query.php):
case 'order' :
$orderby = 'c.lft, ';
break;

To order by the 'ordering' column in content_frontpage, the orderbyPrimary should return 'fp.ordering' when 'order' is passed in instead of 'c.lft'. I have not dug in much further, as changing this works, but it probably breaks something else. I'm very new to Joomla, so I suspect there's a completely different 'order' for categories that this is working on, and the 'order' for featured articles is not accounted for somehow. Regardless, once this change was made locally, the order specified in the administration section for featured articles started working properly. This probably isn't the definitive fix needed, but it seems to be the area that needs to be looked at closer.