My buddy Pete ran into the same thing with his bike shop site back in 2019. He had this slate blue accent on charcoal that he loved, looked like a storm cloud to him, and it tested at 2.8 to 1. He bumped the blue up until it passed but it turned into this neon sky color he hated. What he ended up doing was keeping the muted blue for big headings and lines and buttons, then using a lighter version just for the small text. So the mood stayed but the words still popped. Maybe try that split, since most of the cartoon feel comes from making everything bright at once instead of just the parts people actually read.

Deeper pot helps for sure, but 20 to 5 minutes is way too big a jump to blame on the pot alone. Your old rivet forge probably had a shallow pan with a tiny tuyere, and those things fight you the whole way, so yeah, the new pot fixed real problems. But here's the thing, three months of lighting the same coal teaches your hands stuff you don't even notice. You stop dumping too much coal on, you learn where the air actually needs to hit, you quit choking it with green coal on top. I've seen guys swear by a new forge when really they just got better at reading the fire. Build the same shallow pot again today and I bet you light it in 8 minutes, not 20.