Aren't favorites, comments and likes supposed to help move you up in search here? I know I've got some of those from posting in featured archive threads.
Creating for the sake of creating because you enjoy it is fine, but it's not a marketing plan. If your goal is to sell, sacrificing marketing efforts to create more is a bad plan. I've been doing a ton more creating for more than a year, increased my image count by something like 500% and have yet to sell a print of a single image created within the last year and a half, (I didn't back off on the marketing either). I'm not saying don't bother creating, I'm saying they are not buying just because you create, without effective marketing it doesn't matter how many images you produce. The big question is, what's effective marketing? I have yet to figure that out, or maybe there just isn't way for me, either way I don't think groups are working for me, but I don't think posting images in the feature archives is any more a waste of time than participating in groups in the first place. It works for you or it doesn't. As is usually the case, "your mileage may vary".