Sorry for the delayed reply. Some personal email list subscription confusion.
Is the sphinx theme not configurable anyway?
It is but I couldn't spot a banner version option (readthedocs sphinx theme has this built in). Without that, I think modifying the theme itself or the javascript snippet are the quick solutions. The latter can be done but the migration to the pydata theme renders the work needless (unless it takes them a while to implement...).
This work is so important, and way overdue.
Thanks. It's great to get to contribute to such a neat project.
we should migrate to the pydata-sphinx theme as soon as possible
Noted. That's the path forward then. We'll submit a PR.
the magic behind which they hide the build steps is a great hindrance for new developers trying to understand the overarching process
Sounds good. We might consider some degree of automation of the current workflow to relieve the core devs of some manual tasks but it sounds far down the list of priorities.