I get what you mean about maptext, though I'd consider that a separate request. As far as making atom.color do something other than multiplication, I'd have to call that non-feasible. That ties in too closely with alpha (and indeed alpha is part of it) and it's applied at a fairly low level of the graphics code. In software mode we could do more with it, although I'm not sure why that'd be important, but in DirectX the current usage is rather ideal.