I am glad the Welcome Banner made it into the standard, and although it’s pretty configurable it still doesn’t support my two main usecases.
One option for me is to only show it to unauthenticated users in order to remind them to sign in, but not waste the space of returning users. The extra subtitle for that case is a good start, but not showing it would be better.
What would be an alternative for me is to show it also for logged in users, but only on the / start page or after registration suceeded. There is a homepage setting but this one does show it if you go to /latest and latest is your homepage. Also not really sure about the top and explore options, they don’t really make a difference to me?
So I suggest two new settings, visible only to log logged in or visible only once after login.
I am almost certain what you want could be created in a theme component. Do you have administrative rights on a self hosted instance? I noticed in your bio you have some development background. Perhaps just for fun give it a try yourself if you have time. I myself have achieved a lot using ask.discourse.org
there is another component that has that option, one of the banner components, can’t remember which one, but I remember trying it and liking it. The only caveat as I recall is the dismiss-able functionality required a cookie being set. The cookie then required letting users know you were setting a cookie and some (subset of) users are not cool with that it seems
Anyhow, I do agree the welcome banner takes up a lot of screen real estate and I have that and the search bar as well turned off on my instance but that may simply be because on my instance I am trying to achieve a very simplified and non-intimidating feel.
