If you took your same design concept and changed the coordinate system to polar-coordinate CIELAB, I 100% promise you that essentially all artists would find it

If you took your same design concept and changed the coordinate system to polar-coordinate CIELAB, I 100% promise you that essentially all artists would find it easier and more pleasant to use, without any other required change. For the software developer, the only additional bit of trickiness is that some color changes will push a color out of gamut, so you need to implement some method of bringing those back into gamut. As a simple first method to try let me recommend preserving hue/lightness and clipping the chroma so the result fits within the gamut.