Kind of. According to the article, the mid-riser vs mid-tread distinction correlates to where the 0.5 is applied in the transform. I’m proposing that there is no 0.5 applied at all. Instead of counteracting the compression of the truncation operation by adding a fixed offset, it multiplies by a scale factor.

Possibly my proposal doesn’t hold up to repeated transforms and operations. It might skew toward 255 in real operations.