alt Hacker News> which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet
Is there anything you can do with that information though? This piece of information only becomes useful if you know what colour the background is. And you should also know the colour of text and everything else.
What if the background is muted violet? What if the background is white and the foreground is muted violet? I don't want you to ever use "muted violet" in my terminal, since you have no idea what colours there are in my terminal.
I make Vim colorschemes so I'm fully in control of all those aspects. If I decide I want a given token in muted violet it is because I know that it will works well with the background… that I have defined myself.
The exact values of your 0-15 don't matter to me and they don't matter to you either, because you chose to use my 256c colorscheme to begin with.