Hi Dave,
I don't think it is an issue. I think Kyle's case are special, he is trying to reproduce the color map from SIFT. For example I think the color between yellow and blue in the SIFT color map is certain yellowish color; Kyle only picked yellow and blue as control points from the SIFT color table and passed to satpy, satpy then linearly interpolated the colors between yellow and blue which generate some greenish color which is different from the colors in the SIFT color table. If Kyle picked few more colors from the original SIFT color table as control points, then satpy will linearly interpolate between those colors, so that it won't generate a color map as close as the SIFT one, which will not have the green colors in the middle.
Another example in satpy's colormaps, you may compare the yellow(0.5) to blue(1.0) part of 'rdylbu' vs 'spectral', the yellow(0.5) and blue(1.0) are same, but the colors between defined by the control points between them are different.
rdylbu = Colormap((0.0, (165 / 255.0, 0 / 255.0, 38 / 255.0)),
(0.1, (215 / 255.0, 48 / 255.0, 39 / 255.0)),
(0.2, (244 / 255.0, 109 / 255.0, 67 / 255.0)),
(0.3, (253 / 255.0, 174 / 255.0, 97 / 255.0)),
(0.4, (254 / 255.0, 224 / 255.0, 144 / 255.0)),
(0.5, (255 / 255.0, 255 / 255.0, 191 / 255.0)),
(0.6, (224 / 255.0, 243 / 255.0, 248 / 255.0)),
(0.7, (171 / 255.0, 217 / 255.0, 233 / 255.0)),
(0.8, (116 / 255.0, 173 / 255.0, 209 / 255.0)),
(0.9, (69 / 255.0, 117 / 255.0, 180 / 255.0)),
(1.0, (49 / 255.0, 54 / 255.0, 149 / 255.0)))
spectral = Colormap((0.0, (158 / 255.0, 1 / 255.0, 66 / 255.0)),
(0.1, (213 / 255.0, 62 / 255.0, 79 / 255.0)),
(0.2, (244 / 255.0, 109 / 255.0, 67 / 255.0)),
(0.3, (253 / 255.0, 174 / 255.0, 97 / 255.0)),
(0.4, (254 / 255.0, 224 / 255.0, 139 / 255.0)),
(0.5, (255 / 255.0, 255 / 255.0, 191 / 255.0)),
(0.6, (230 / 255.0, 245 / 255.0, 152 / 255.0)),
(0.7, (171 / 255.0, 221 / 255.0, 164 / 255.0)),
(0.8, (102 / 255.0, 194 / 255.0, 165 / 255.0)),
(0.9, (50 / 255.0, 136 / 255.0, 189 / 255.0)),
(1.0, (94 / 255.0, 79 / 255.0, 162 / 255.0)))
Hope I make it clear.
Yufei