Most specifically "colorblind-friendly" color schemes suck. Most "regular" color schemes are at least partially accessible to colorblindness though. My complaint is that the author claimed the changes "preserve accessibility" while objectively making the theme less accessible. If the colors are indistinguishable in greyscale, that is not a good thing. Heck, there's not even one true way to determine what the "greyscale equivalent" of a given color is.
The author's initial complaint was that Solarized doesn't have enough light-dark contrast between the text and the background and took a stab at solving this after reading a little bit about color theory.
Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting hack (which makes this relevant for HN) but my concern is with the author making misleading accessibility claims and calling it an "optimized" or "improved" theme (to the point that others have commented they are downloading and using it themselves) while clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding of accessibility and admitting to having a very limited knowledge of "color theory".
Specifically, there was no need to homogenize the colors like this in order to increase the light-dark contrast of the theme. Even from a design aspect alone it made the theme blander, less interesting. The author lacks the knowledge to understand what makes the theme work, so how can they claim they have improved upon it?
Again, it's an interesting hack and a fun creative exercise and the result may even serve the author's and others' needs. But neither did it "preserve accessibility", nor did it "improve" nor "optimize" the theme. Your argument seems to be that restricting color palettes to make them more accessible by default limits creative choices, but my point is that arbitrarily pinning the lightness as an amateur attempt at improving light-dark contrast has this exact same effect (i.e. making the result less interesting) while additionally making the result less accessible.
