For the last few years, I have played sysadmin and so have seen lots of command --version outputs. I think what we have covers most needs, but the tail that it does not cover is extremely long. We should say that @version_option is complete as is. Later we can make an improved one named something like @custom_version_option that is much simpler and also much easier to have do custom things. Then we can take the old one through a normal deprecation process. The signature that I have in mind is something like this:

def custom_version_option(
    version: str | None = None,
    *param_decls: str,
    format_cls: VersionWriter|None = None,
): 

The VersionWriter class is mutually exclusive with version and name and has some methods like inspect_for_name and render_version.

This covers the most common case simply which is printing version like 1.1.1 or v1.1.1 or having us inspect and print the same, but if you want something fully custom, then you can easily do it.

This will also make it easier for click-extra to offers customization. It can just provide the class, which can be imported from click-extra and used without a bunch of overriding click stuff.