Thank you for your appreciation of our work!
Compliments are rarer than you might imagine and yes tools like this don't just fall out of the sky as some would like to believe.
These things have taken years of effort and perseverance through every real-life trial imaginable (well, ok, many of them).
So I have saved your full post and will take a good close look at all the points you raised in due course, I had doubts about the palette myself some months back but felt like nobody was buying/using it anyway.
So, best of luck with Stunt Car Racer, a classic, I think I only played it on Amiga, that's got to be a tough coding job on the 8-bits, I will defo keep an eye out for it.
Cheers!