Featured Posts Not Showing

I have recently been in contact with WordPress Support regarding an issue on my site. My theme supports 4 ‘Featured’ post spaces on my homepage which has been running fine until recently. I have the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin installed to keep all blog posts from the front page. Unfortunately, recently, I am unable to use all 4 Featured spaces and WordPress Support have been unable to help. Their response was:
I am not seeing exactly what the issue is but I suspect that the plugin may be confusing some categories and tags since both posts and pages have similar categories and tags on them. What I would suggest doing is reaching out to the plugin developer to let them know what is going on and seeing if they can provide some more insight.
Are you able to advise what it causing the problem, and how I can go about fixing the issue please?

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]