The "extra tap" thing reminds me of my friend Dave, his grandma could never find the settings gear in her email app, so she just stopped using it. He ended up printing her a cheat sheet and taping it to her monitor, which sort of worked but looked awful.

Same here man. Didn't realize I was hurting the trees until a buddy pointed out the collar thing and I felt like an idiot for years of bad cuts.

Blurring the photo down is a solid trick, I use it all the time for packaging mockups. The real game changer is actually duplicating the layer, applying a median filter at like 20-30 pixels, then using the eyedropper on that. It averages the pixels without smearing the edges as much as a standard blur. I learned this from a product photographer who swears by it for matching fabrics in catalogs. Have you tested that method side by side with your blur trick to see which one grabs the truest midtone?

Yo have you tried the digital swatch tool on Adobe? For me the book was a total waste of money too but the digital version lets me see colors under different lighting conditions before I even buy ink. I also switched to using actual printed proofs from my local shop instead of relying on the book's paper. The fan deck is way more accurate for my workflow too, especially when I'm matching spot colors for packaging jobs. Sucks you had to learn this the hard way like I did but at least you know now.

Three years ago I switched my mom's phone to high contrast mode and text zoomed way up and she didn't even notice half her apps looked weird... @riverk82 makes a good point about greyscale not being for reading though, I think a lot of people just mess with settings until something clicks. I checked my own stuff in accessibility mode after that and found buttons way too close together, stuff overlapping, just bad. It's crazy how much we take for granted with default settings, designers really should be testing this stuff more often.