Consider the following: if your design expertise was as significant as your database expertise, perhaps your view of the downstream implications of decisions in each would be more alike than not.
Downstream implications are less important in some fields than others.
Can you present an argument for your case that downstream implications in design are about as important as they are in databases instead of appeal to imaginary authority?
All the colors in a design are chosen to look good together. Changing one major color could necessitate changing all of them, and likely also icons and image assets. Even photos could be tuned to the contrast ratios of the design.
Changing things that people are used to, like colors, tends to make them upset.
If text used to be black and now it's almost black so something else could be darker, some of the customers are going to be grumpy.
Precisely. They're "just colors"? "Just integers"?
Don't hardcode integers either if you can help it.
What kind of fear mongering is this? :D If I ever feel we should have made something less dark I will just change it. It's not like I signed a deal with the devil which locks me into that particular colour choice.
I understand if you ask a similarly worded question about some choice in a database schema, but colours on a UI? Fleeting like a butterfly.