Right - and more I reckon. In hindsight things seem so easy or fall easily into place and this is no exception.

The obvious thing with respect to this new 'color space' is its nonlinearity/'curvature'. We should have gleaned this (or have taken more cognizance from existing overvations) from the way the eye works in different circumstances - and for that matter from the fact that different eyes perceive colors in different ways - as Ishihara tests bear out. It also should have been obvious from the 'dynamical' way the eye perceives color.

Anyone who has done color balancing/grading or tried to match colors knows how easily it is to be fooled unless they've lots of calibration equipment around them, as the eye automatically adjusts color balance and such depending on lighting and circumstance (remember those shadow images that fool everyone).

There are other clues too: why do a small percentage of women have superior color resolution in the green spectrum (as if they had multiple green channels) and the fact that the degree of this capability also depends on conditions and circumstance (a seemingly nonlinear effect)? That's right, the signs were there and it's good that we've now picked them up and are now running with them.

That said, we cannot be too critical of that earlier work, in fact what was done was pretty monumental. After all, the 1931 CIE work was and still is quite remarkable and it's still serving us well today - 91 years on.

Like Newtonian mechanics and Relatively, every development inches us closer to the truth and or provides us with better accuracy.