Make the dessert
We skip it because the meal already feels like enough work. It's the course people remember, and it's the easiest one to get right.
Dessert is the course that gets cut. You've planned the meat, you've got three sides going, the timing is tight, and somewhere in there you decide people will be full anyway.
They will be full. They'll also be a little disappointed, and they won't say so.
I think dessert gets skipped for a reason that isn't really about the food. By the time you're cooking, dessert feels like a fourth thing on a list of three, and the meal already feels like enough. But a dessert is usually the least demanding thing you'll make all day. A cobbler is fruit, sugar and a batter you don't stir. Cookies are twenty minutes. Neither competes for the oven at the moment everything else needs it, because both can be made hours ahead or the day before.
The thing I keep coming back to is that dessert is like eggs: nearly impossible to be sad about. Put a plate of cookies on a table and something happens to the room. It isn't about the cooking being impressive. It's the signal that the meal was thought about all the way to the end.
It's also the course with the most room in it. Nobody has strong opinions about how you should serve fruit and cream. There's no canon to violate, no regional version to get wrong, no one at the table who grew up with their grandmother's way of doing it. If you want to put Tajin on something sweet or serve cobbler at nine in the morning, that's available to you in a way it isn't with brisket.
The one real constraint is balance, and it runs the other way from how people usually think about it. A dessert doesn't need to be light because the meal was heavy. It needs to be different. After smoked pork and beans and cornbread, something cold and sharp lands better than something rich, not because of how full anyone is but because six courses of the same register stop registering at all. Fruit and acid after fat and smoke. Ice cream against something warm.
That's the same thinking as a salad next to a rich main, and it's the same mistake when it goes wrong: the problem is rarely that there's too much food, it's that everything on the table is doing the same job.
So make the dessert. Make it the day before if that's what it takes. It's the part people remember, it's the easiest thing on the menu, and skipping it is the only decision in a meal that nobody notices until they're driving home.