Awesome

vim-colors-meh

A 256-color / 24-bit Vim color scheme, with preference for contrast over hues.

It works for me, just publishing it in case someone has similar taste and wants to use it.

January 2020

older screenshot

Copy the files to the appropriate directories in ~/.vim/, use vim's native pack, or use a plugin manager like vim-plug, e.g.

Plug 'davidosomething/vim-colors-meh'
colorscheme meh

Enable the pandoc syntax if you want special pandoc colors. It requires a full plugin install, so ensure the plugin/ dir is part of your runtime.

let g:meh_pandoc_enabled = 1

The background is not fully black, and Normal text is not fully white to be easier on the eyes.
Comments are greyed-out and italicized
Returns are orange for easy scanning when you use early-return pattern
Booleans, super, this, and constants stand out
Strings are in blue since that is the color people most likely ignore
Text is slightly brown, and everything else is a contrasted

As best as possible, the base Vim highlight groups and colorscheme specific groups are the only things that are actually assigned colors. Syntax specific highlight groups are links to those colors.
The hi command is called directly instead of using Vim variables and functions to call it dynamically. It makes things harder to manage, but it loads much faster. I may consider statically compiling it in the future.
I customize colors for the plugins I use or used in the past only. Feel free to fork if you want to add more.
Support for vim-pandoc is provided via an autoload function that is called on demand by the provided plugin to properly override the built-in pandoc colors.
Some other plugins are also customized, such as Neomake, showmarks, and vim-signature, but I might not be using those plugins at the moment so support may be limited.

MIT