I've been out of the loop for many years, but if I recall correctly, the main motivation of the change of colors going back was not to assist color blind people, but because it had some kind of preferable effect for television reproduction to distinguish the balls. I guess under lighting and the cameras of the day, there was an issue with the purple 4 and the maroon 7. So they made the 4 pink and the 7 brown. I never understood the issue whether watching old accustats vids that were on VHS, to the DVD days, or to today with digital between either the original ball colors vs the "tv" set balls. It seems like a solution to a problem that never existed, and just made things worse for the color blind.
I'm with you though, there should be a standardization of the ball colors. And given 1/20 males are color blind, this would be very helpful.
Now, the problem is this - some people are red/green, others are green/red colorblind. So there's no way to make it ideal for everyone. There's also different severity levels. People with moderate to severe color blindness are going to struggle no matter what you do.
However, I think it's logical to start with the traditional colors and work from there. Whomever came up the pool ball colors that became most common used a certain logic... primary colors, then secondary colors. See below
1,2,3 should have no change. These are primary colors. They are not composites of other colors.
The 4,5,6 are secondary colors, that is, each one is a mix of 2 primary colors. Purple is from blue/red. Orange is from yellow/red. Green from blue/yellow.
Then you get to the 7... It's maroon. That's just a deep red. So in the traditional set, 1 color gets "reused" just darkened. This to me has always been the odd ball. There's no other ball that's the same color just a deeper version, except for the 7.
8 ball don't count, because black is not a color, neither is white, nor is gray.
All that said ... for color blind people, the 2 and the 4 has always been the key problem. Whenever I have seen men confuse balls, it's always always the 2 and 4.
There's 2 strategies for making this better...
1. Use different colors that are distinguishable even for color blind people. (the con of this is changing the familiarity of the set for everyone, including for color blind people and that's annoying for us and them, Example, the abomination of the purple 5!!!)
2. Use darker/lighter hues of colors to create more separation between the balls. Think of this like "contrast"
When it comes to the 4 ball, making it pink solved that issue in the TV set but not in the best way. It's a big change since purple is one of the three main secondary colors derived from the 3 primary colors, and the 7 is still an issue - and pink a good available alternative got used on the 4. Purple should stay!!! Rather, it's better to just put more separation between the 2 and 4, by lightening the purple of the 4 or shifting the shade just a hair more violet.
This would save pink to be used for the 7 ball. Now you have
full color uniqueness across the set without losing purple and keeping the order the same instead of moving traditional colors to new numbers. (again, the abomination of the purple 5, dumbest thing ever)
More benefits are the green doesn't need to be lightened much because it's no longer being confused with the 7. Brown for the 7 is awful. It's more confusion for color blind people between it an the 6 and sometimes even the 5 or 3. What a mess!!! Brown is a mix of red, blue and yellow which is the most problematic.
The ideal set would be: just fix the 2/4 confusion for the colorblind by adjusting the brightness/darkness of the 4, and get rid of the color duplication and confusion on the 7 by making it pink ball. This preserves the nice primary/secondary order of the colors, it's familiar to everyone, it's classic and the only thing that had to change was the 7, which was the odd ball color anyway in the logic scheme.
It almost reminds me of snooker a bit, as the pink is before the black. Works well!
That will probably never happen, because the reasons why these companies do things are probably quite different.
