I don’t know exactly what the differences are with the pavilion one. But I can say that the official one now loads all the necessary data without any extra HTTP requests.
Themes and plugins are configured in very different ways, so you’ll have to set it up from scratch.
I think the main difference is that in the theme component the admin configures which badges appear on posts and in the plugin the user decides in their preferences.
Yes, I just checked the difference and it also looks to me like described here. And I also know that some of my users are using this feature and selected the badges they want to show. So in my case this does not seem to be an alternative. Hm.
A perfect solution would be to have the functionality of the plugin in addition and let the admin choose which way it’s needed/wanted. 