I’ve always felt like the contrast was too low, feels harder to read
Personally, astigmatism causes halation[1] of the text with dark modes. The only time I find them tolerable or needed is when I'm in a very dark room.
In the day, when I do most of my work, I am in a lit room or outside and I am looking at physical documents, desktop environments, and web pages that are all light-colored. I would feel my eyes and brain churning every time I'd have to re-focus on a dark-themed window in this context, so it only makes sense to have my code/text light-colored as well.
One Dark is more like what I want.
But even that's not perfect. The color for comments (as with many dark themes) is too dim. Comments shouldn't stand out, but they should also be easy to read when needed. I think that Visual Studio's dark color scheme actually does great there. The green comments separate themselves well from the code, don't draw too much attention to themselves, and they're still clear when you're trying to read them.
Justification: A comment that exists should only exist if it is important, if it is helpful documentation for a function or for some specific code section. If that's the case then a comment should absolutely be the first thing you see, thus it should stand out.
That sound a bit like I would advocate to comment less, but that hasn't been the effect of that change. To the contrary, I'd say it was a factor in my placing more (in my eyes important) comments in code bases than many other developers I work with.
It's rather thought out colour scheme and kudos for the success, but contrast is way too low. My eyes got tired very fast while trying to use solarized scheme.
I've stuck with `Tomorrow Night Bright` for quite some time now as I enjoy the scheme and the contrastiness of it, though I tweaked it that the text is almost pure white and background is almost pure black.