This has nothing to do with personal preference. I regret I said “bad design practice”: this was a mistake that pushed the discussion toward an unwanted direction. I filed this as a bug, because:
- #000 in Neutral is inconsistent with #222 in Light (text) and Dark (background).
- Inconsistency is bad and will come back to bite you.
- Here is how I’ve been bitten: I customized my Discourse instance, under the Light theme, with a lot of black and white images tuned for #222 black. Then I installed the Neutral and Dark themes, to allow my users to choose among them (nice feature). The result is that, under Neutral, all my images seems washed-out compared to the text.
Of course, I immediately fixed the issue with CSS. But you might want to fix the inconsistency nonetheless.