Hi Wieland and congrats on your paper!
The issue you saw had been addressed in 1.7.0. We were generating codebooks for color and scale using k-means, which would result in bad values sometimes for the extremes. In 1.7.0 we switched to an optimal quantiser with outlier handling. It was actually surprisingly hard to get this right.
I just got opus to valid this now and it found another issue with our scale codebook gen, which I will fix now. Huzzzah!