Great to see you all come with ideas!
For my taste, the clock in the center is a nice UI signature from Jolla, compared to ios or android who always put clock on the side.
I do enjoy the clock centered.
There is a sort of Gnome Flavor, linux UX, to have a clock nicely centered.
Maybe from your ideas i like @fingus proposal the most, maybe the most ‘clean’ and still keeping the previous design of having a clock in central position…