Just a tip for the designers: what about just testing an high-definition sunflower?
Topic on Project talk:Proposal for changing logo of MediaWiki, 2020
The problem is that the sunflower looks best only with hi-color devices. For printing, or on monochrome displays, it looks very bad (as the needed details have very low contrasts): you then jsut see a flower, all yellows are flattened. This makes a very poor logo at small sizes (e.g. favicons).
And as it is just a photo, it has no distinctive visual identity (only added by the surrounding square brackets, and the fact the logo is actually always used with the wordmark).
A better distinctive logo was needed since long, taking into account the experience. The old logo was designed fast, and in fact could not even be protected, so it was effectively in public domain (except when combined with the registered wordmark) and the logo could then be used abusively, but still legally (without the protected wordmark).