I’ve noticed this issue as well. There is no straightforward way to prioritize pinned topics. You effectively have to unpin and pin again to get them to show up in the order you want.
It does seem like it would help if we had something between pinned and bannered for cases when a banner is not appropriate/overkill but we want to have one topic always show up first and highlighted.
Here on meta I’ve noticed that the “about this category” topic gets buried over time, rendering it pretty much meaningless except for very new users. This is somewhat mitigated if you enable the Category Banners theme component, but that only displays a snippet of the first paragraph of the about topic.