@clyde yes yes yes i have churned through this entire thing in my brain for AGES i think i have a good idea for how i want it to work
i found out that the color distance i've used for the longest time (i.e. in https://github.com/Lana-chan/maples-retro-extravaganza) is completely unsuitable for this kind of thing and gone into a rabbit hole about how best to dither things (<3 atkinson)
unfortunately putting ideas to paper (or code as the case may be) is an incredibly painstaking process for me
@mavica_again yeah after redoing a bunch of assets I realized I really wanted a tool that would let me apply adjustments before dithering to a given palette and visually persuade the graphic into the new colorspace
eg. nudge the hue wheel to align with available gradients (or purposely disalign if it looks cool)