It is 5 am, I have not slept tonight, but what I have done makes me very happy.
It was too easy and took no coding. Even though I'm a professional programmer I was not excited to learn qt and hate c++ with a passion. I did not need to. Seriously, it is my belief that anyone could have done this if they really wanted to
The Problem
I've not been able to find a theme which lets me have small floating panels and a nice brownish colour profile. All the brown themes I've liked have a massive border radius in the floating panels, and thus my two panel layout takes up an absurd amount of space. 64 pixels in total, though it seems a bit larger to me. Maybe that doesn't account for the bottom empty space.
Fixing It
I knew at this point I'd have to learn a bit about plasma theming in order to get what I wanted, and had been procrastinating for about a month. Tonight, I could not sleep, so around 2 I decided to try it out. I started online and found nothing on my specific problem, with people suggesting I just "try another theme". Perhaps I was googling wrong, but no useful information there. went back in to the settings though and found the edit button on the plasma theme section. Right there were all the SVGs needed to alter the theme and a nice button to get to the directory where it was all housed.
I searched up panel, found three images, and tried something incredibly dumb. I just yeeted them into inkscape, made the borders on each image smaller, and changed my theme away and back. Fantastic, now the corners are smaller and I can shrink my panels to a reasonable size. It took about 15 minutes in total. To be fair, each corner was it's own path and I had to do this 4 times and be cautious of some shadowing but I seriously think anyone could have gotten this done. Fuck man, the theme I'm using is distributed under the GPL. That's place is wild.
Conclusion
Plasma is built for people who want to change their experience and I love the devs for that. At this point I'd be surprised if I found something I couldn't do. If you're curious, here's the finished product. It'll take some more work with a colour picker to get the sliders the right way but for now this is fantastic
Plasma has gone from being one of the worst DEs (slow, buggy, kind of ugly) to being the absolute best in a really short amount of time.
Plasma just has killer features that other desktops just don't have, like KDE connect and the encrypted vaults. Sure you can get those things on other desktops, but they're not built in and they're nowhere near as seamless. Plus KDE apps in general are just better.