Its really funny osu! rules even bother to bring Featured Artists up lol. There is basically a staff run group called Mapper's Guild that gets first "dibs" on the music that osu! is allegedly buying, but isn't that demotivating for overall mappers not in that group to try and map that content?
And now there are badges for exclusively for that group, so if you are not in it, its better to wait til you are accepted (which may be never) to start mapping the licensed music by osu! so you can get those badges easier.
Then you can take into consideration, especially with the popularization of pishi videos that peppy subsidizes, that now handsome/pishi/nokris/NP/dsco/etc. are in the mapper's guild that every map they release is going to be favorite of the community. So what is the point in making one of your own Featured Artist map?
Their group is pretty exclusive its not like there is any attempt by them to try and encourage people still left over trying to map the Featured Artist tracks, that are similarly left over from the Mapper's guild dibs system, to get better at mapping or help push their content for ranked. Honestly nobody gives 2 fks about those people not in the group trying to map FA obviously, why do you think there would be 0 things in place to help them + exclusive rewards for mapper's guild to just be busy with their work instead of helping anyone else? Epic.
But yeah guys lets use the "licensed" music from random japanese anime's and hope those guys who made it can't read our english website enough to DMCA us and then have a super hypocritical system in place for Featured Artist so no mappers actually want to touch the Featured Artist music.
(not to mention the ranked maps of Featured artist and just the regular uploaded music from the groups has really bad timing so people who can't fix the timing on the maps actually can't bother with the songs at all)