Perhaps I am seeing patterns where there are none, but I've seen that articles with the wrong kind of controversial potential sometimes get bumped back. I'm having difficulty putting it to words, though, and can't produce any evidence to back it up.

It's a real shame, sometimes. I feel there is a lot that can be learned from Terry Davis and TempleOS.

Yes, there are definitely different weights for threads based on multiple factors such as flags, certain domains/topics, and manual intervention by the mods.