Hey there!
The splashscreen is a gimmick, because of the issue that when it displays, it prevents other elements from loading.
The idea is good, especially on slow systems, to hide all the “stuff moving around” when the panel and widgets are loading
But as it is not a transparent overlay, it slows down startup with no benefit.
While it would be cool to fix the behavior to be useful in said cases, I would propose setting it to “none” by default.
Hi -
That sounds like the core issue here - do you still see issues caused by the splash screen itself, rather than just visualized differently, after the changes made from 473874 – Fix the splash screen to not slow down boot > 357170 – plasmashell loaded longer than ksplash ?
Oh I havent timed. It might well be that this was fixed.
Still, a starting animation is kinda dated UI
If we assume that those issues are fixed, then I guess it comes down to the UX preference then - personally, I do kind of like them because I like when my device gives more explicit indicators of what’s happening, instead of implicit ones where you need to infer the status.
For what it’s worth, the splash screen with the loading spinner pretty clearly indicates “your desktop is loading” 
