Looking at limitations of old consoles, things like the Snes’s 15-bit colors actually seem like they would lead to some compelling differences in workflow if there is a hard step limit to colors. Mostly because you are not stuck to one palette, but all colors are also internally working on the same “scale” in a sense.
Its unfortunately not something you can really accomplish with plugins easily, and changing the palette after the fact is not really the same thing either. Its also not really possible to do it through indexing.