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But as I say, maybe a more "complete" 1:1 sun position representation would be cool as a new feature. (These are just my thoughts on the topic, don't take me seriously; Mm may think differently.)

My thoughts on a complete procedural sun position system; the logic of this can be broken down into three functional blocks:

1. Calender / Sidereal conversion. For Earth's sky the direction of processing for this is calendar to sidereal - it takes a Date & Time fat wire and outputs a sidereal time of year and a sidereal time of day. It has to deal with the edge cases of the Gregorian Calendar and the fact that northern winter solstice doesn't coincide with new year exactly. The new features of 2.44 don't simplify this. For alien skies, the sidereal time of year and sidereal time of day are raw inputs, this functional block works in the opposite direction, and it's also optional - you don't have to invent an alien calendar if you don't want to.
2. Sun Position Calculator. Takes the sidereal time of year and sidereal time of day - raw inputs or outputs of the previous block - and combines them with three more raw inputs - latitude, longitude, and axial tilt - to produce two outputs: sun azimuth and sun elevation. The new features of 2.44 don't simplify this either. But they could have. One more new calculator function in the vector operations tab - rotate vector by orientation - would have simplified it a lot.
3. Sun Position Effector. Takes the sun azimuth and sun elevation and makes the sun appear at that position. This is where the new features of 2.44 are a huge win. You can probably make this functional block with one logic gadget - a Sun & Sky. Pre 2.44, you had to record Keyframes with the sun at nadir, zenith, and cardinal points on the horizon, and those were difficult Keyframes to record - the sun position couldn't be aligned to the grid. And you had to do trigonometry to calculate the power values for the Timelines you put the Keyframes on. Pre 2.44 trigonometry. And we know what a pain that was.

Trigonometry functions accessibility

I seem to remember that the first incarnation of the Calculator Improvements item on the Trello mentioned mathematical constants. I understand why they didn't add these as calculator functions - no reason to waste a gadget's worth of thermo for something that you can do by typing a number into a tweak. But some other way of accessing mathematical constants - perhaps a cluster of shortcut buttons when typing a number - would have made it easier to use trigonometric functions. The constants would of course include pi / 180 and 180 / pi, and you could quickly set a tweak to one of those values and set the blend mode to modulate whenever you needed to convert between radians and degrees.

On the other hand, it could lead to some weird hacky uses to set such initial state--emitting a selector purely to create a selector that starts from C for example. Which seems hacky and unintentional. (Though an actual setting for which starts as default, and opening up these hidden initial states would be great as an official addition.) So some sort of option may be the best way of introducing this, so that people who like these hacky things or find some special use for this quirk can still do so... Not sure.

Indeed, the bake tool preserving the current state of the baked object's logic as its initial state is a thing that I've already found useful: https://indreams.me/element/owrvMZjyiBL.