Yeah, that designer friend did you a solid. I made the same switch a while back and it really does make everything feel way less harsh on the eyes.

Why is 4.5 suddenly good enough though? WCAG AA is the bare minimum. It's not a badge of honor. It's like saying your car runs because the tires aren't flat. Sure, it works. But it's not comfortable or safe. I've seen people defend 4.5 like it's some kind of achievement. Meanwhile half the users over 50 or with bad eyesight are squinting at your site. If you're building anything for the public, you should be aiming for AAA. Not because it's required. Because people deserve to read without pain. That "sleek" gray on gray trend you mentioned is a joke. Designers worship aesthetics over function. They pick colors that look good on their fancy monitors and forget real people use phones in sunlight. If you caught it before launch, great. But don't let 4.5 become your goal. That's just lazy. Aim higher.

Read a guy on Practical Machinist who saved even more switching to MQL.

That's interesting about the JFK autopsy reports, I never dug into those myself. I watched a documentary once that claimed the "magic bullet" theory was total bunk because the bullet was found practically pristine, which seemed impossible. But then I read somewhere that the bullet actually hit JFK first in the back (not the head, like a lot of people assume) and the trajectory lines up perfectly with the path it took through both men. It's wild how one small detail, like the order of the shots, changes everything.

Yeah I know exactly what you mean, I had a similar wake up call a few years back with a client who hated my detailed breakdowns. I was so stubborn about it at first, thought they just didn't want to do the work. But once I stripped it all down to the basics, they actually read the thing and stopped asking me questions every week.