Really? The earliest download I could find was from October 2006, that being the JJ2 conversion pack. Granted, there's a good chance I MISSED something, but the very first news post regarding "Featured Downloads" (at least as far as Dark Sonic goes) happened on Page 31 on November 2nd, 2006, which is where I stopped. If it goes back further than that, I apologize and will take a few moments to skim over the remaining 29 pages I didn't check, starting from 31 and going back in time.

...ah. There's another one here by FireSworD on Page 34... Thank you for telling me, Cooba. *gets busy*

Edit: All done! Unless there were several Featured Download entries labelled with unconventional news tags ("Better late than never..." is one I found), I should have labelled everything excluding Cooba's "Random Race Levels", which he labelled himself after pointing out my job wasn't quite finished. XD