Yeah, I am very much aware of the tech, I use it extensively myself. It's a fantastic way to make clean looking lowspec assets, or even blockouts to be sculpted/refined later. I guess the confusing part is that if you are at a stage where you need a lot of colors without optimization yet, then you might aswell start from a…
Well when bringing in a reference image you could for instance create little dabs where you want to extract the colors from. Overall what I am trying to get at is that going for a "real" palette directly can prevent this kind of flexibility. But that said it seems to clearly work well for you, so my point is moot really :D…