I understood this feature request differently, perhaps. Simply, the ability to actually display badges granted manually on a given post. To my mind it’s not a question of what other badges are “excluded”, it’s a much more targeted feature, with its own clear-to-me value.
Moderators and admins partly have the responsibility of guiding and improving the conversation in their forums. And hopefully we can all agree that popularity is not the best (or at least only) measure of quality. Thus the existing Like functionality is not sufficient to meet the full needs of promoting good dialog. Modmins can do some good in diversifying the conversation and rewarding/promoting otherwise less popular posts, if they’re valuable. Ideally they would have multiple tools at their disposal to do this.
Since we already have the ability to grant badges on-demand on a given post, it makes sense that such badges be optionally displayable on the post for which they were granted. This would work especially well for badges you hid from profiles and allowed granting multiple times.
Maybe there’s a better way to achieve this that I’m not thinking of? Staff color is too obtrusive for many uses, IMO.