Every data visualization is necessarily a contrivance because it is creating visual features for things that weren't already visual. Data visualization researc

Every data visualization is necessarily a contrivance because it is creating visual features for things that weren't already visual. Data visualization research has not been able to formalize a rigorous notion of visual "information" in a form that usefully predicts performance across the enormous variety of visualization tasks and settings for which colormaps might be applied. "Distortion" is also a common but somewhat meaningless term. You're referring to perceptual effects (related to color appearance) that are side-effects of using "jet", but again, for some tasks they may be an acceptable side-effect, given the benefits of increased discriminability. Our different levels of certainty and conviction may arise from my being a data vis academic, rather than a tool user or tool builder.