The figure isn't using all of the colors in the triangle + skin tone ramp. It's only using 21 + bg if you ignore the placeholder green at the unfinished parts. But you're right, it tends to push using more colors rather than color consolidation.
At the current size, most of the individual ramps in the triangle are 3-5 colors long. Which seems like it should be the right size. Would a smaller triangle be too small? Maybe a different arrangement than triangle would work better? Or using a larger triangle to start from and step every other color or every 3rd color as needed? Maybe a smaller triangle and a better choice of colors? I'm not sure where to go from here.
Color choice. I could write a lot here, but so very much of it is an arbitrary choice. The short version, is that I ramped hue on an RYB wheel rather than Lab or RGB, and ramped lightness and chroma on Luv.
There is no good standard for the RYB blue or the secondaries, so I used these:
And the wedges end up looking like this:
The corners (marked light hue and dark hue) are about 14-15% max chroma and lightness of 85-90 and 12-15, depending on hue. The saturated color is reduced to 90% max chroma for the leftmost step of the triangle.
The triangle in the original post used green, yellow, and blue as the corners. Green and yellow are light to begin with, and the RYB blue (rgb = 0,70,255) is a mid-tone blue rather than the darker blue255. Hopefully that explains the brightness imbalance? I don't have photoshop, could you elaborate on the imbalance you see? I also used these hues for the rainbow of colors in the second image, you can judge how balanced they are (or are not).
Really, the colors are guesswork and unsupported choices. Pure RGB or Lab space would probably get results that work fine if you wanted to try this approach. I welcome any feedback on this.
Tourist