Having spent two years failing at color theory, @eishiya linked me to a helpful primer that finally clicked... it clicked in that I gave up on color theory and went back to the math and physics I'm far more familiar with

At first I did a bunch of layer-compositing in GIMP, proving the idea, and then I made a little tool (free for all):

Mathy Palettes

By no means is one expected to use all of the colors generated in the grid, but it creates some really usable starting ramps.

I went from here(Old me, painful to look at ):


To here(New me, math based palettes ):


In a week. I'm pretty happy

Tell me what you think.