I willing to argue with you here regarding depicting air pressure with a whole color map being “overkill”.
In my opinion it is not overkill!
It’s an incredible useful tool to se how the low-pressure areas and the high-pressure areas are moving around, since so much of weather system behavior are influenced by the pressure. Yes, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction and all the other variables of course also matter.
But the number #1 factor to track, on a “whole map”-scale “in color”, is the pressure.
The key is to set up the color so that you get an intuitive understanding of what you are looking at!
I just posted in another thread how I chose to set it up. The below described setting will show blue for low-pressure areas, red for the high-pressure areas and white/no color for the “normal pressure” showing the transitioning are from high to low or low to high.