I accepted your criticism as far as it was reasonable to me. Im not a professional, nor do I think my chart needs to meet your conception of a professional standard. As I said it is clearly legible to myself and many other people. The middle map yeah its not accessible to someone with colorblindness issues, I get that. I agreed with you. The other two are accessible and legible perfectly fine in grayscale for anyone with vision issues.

The idea of it not having more than 5 classes is something I even personally already did when it was feasible on the orange map, without knowing anything of what is apparently a standard. I intentionally did not break down the scales any further just for that clarity. That was not an option for the red map, as finer bands made far more sense in that case considering the width of the scale that was caused by massive fluctuations in state minimum wages

I dont see how this an issue with me as opposed to you being a nitpick since you do this as a day job. Im doing it for fun and for my own visualization. And it appears most people dont seem to have any problem understanding them. Maybe you oughtta lighten up a bit