SharePoint 2010 - My Sites, modifications to navigation ribbon at the very top

After much online research and getting close to what I am looking for by hacking it together (ie. modifying templates and other files, exactly what every expert out there appears to advise against in terms of SharePoint customization) I have decided to go ahead and post my issue here to see if anybody has ever had any experience with this.

In essence, I start off with a plain My Sites host. I would like to keep the My Profile and My Content pages, and add a bunch of new content of top on that. For us, simplicity is of utmost importance and so when I created a new Web Part Page and noticed that it added an additional ribbon under the navigation menu, I decided that it had to go. This is what it looks like out of the box:

With ribbon

Notice that at this point I have already made a few modifications, such as removing the My Site link that by default appears all the way to the left of the other options. This sadly was accomplished in a very brute-force way.

Now, here is the ribbon-free navigation bar, which is just what I want to be able to design without making system changes that I will regret in the future (and that may be easily overwritten by a CU or hotfix)

Without ribbon

So I guess I shou开发者_高级运维ld make this clear, I don't want the navigation gone, just customized (ie. no My Site string to the left of my options, no Site Actions drop-down for read-only users) and the Browse/Page ribbon that gets added by default everytime you create a new page, well that one just needs to be gone completely, as shown in the second screenshot.

I have read all about hiding ribbons (which just hides the whole thing, including navigation), customizing ribbons (no success in accomplishing this type of basic navigation after trying them out) and simply don't know what to do anymore.

Maybe I am just taking the wrong approach by modifying something instead of just creating it from scratch, at the end of the day it is nothing but a static navigation bar common to all the pages with the special current user drop-down all the way to the right, then if a user has write permissions, she would also get the Site Actions drop-down under Home, that's it.

Hopefully an answer to this question will help others as well who are looking to simplify their SharePoint My Sites host a bit, as out of the box the number of web components that users are presented with might be just a little too overwhelming for your everyday employee, at least in the industry that we operate in.

Anyway, thank you kindly in advance, I look forward to your replies. Do let me know if there is something that is not entirely clear from my explanation :)

If you take away user's Create Personal Site permission (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262500.aspx) in your User Profile, the "My Site" link will go away.