I am working on the finishing stages of a Templating Extension that would tailor to this request easily. For example, in the Template I am testing now, I move that component on the right side as shown here: Template Preview. As you can see many other components are rearranged and even another dynamic conditional cover has been added, all done through a client-side JS transpiler that converts your html/etc-syntax to a collection of mithril components with no dependencies.
This extension gives you full control to override any component you wish with your own HTML, along with benefits - for instance, you can easily separate the badges from the avatar simply in code definition. <badges-component> is its own entity and can be placed anywhere you wish inside the discussion template code, along with every other component/property.
Maybe you could also do this with css, but it could result in hacky uncompliant code by the time you are satisfied with the result. I will be expanding more on this soon.
