What are these utilities ? can you list the names or link
In order to see the current used Workbench colors (sorry i was under the impression it allowed to change them as well) you can use palettedemo.
For changing the current Workbench colors on the fly you can use rtPalette.
No particular reason, just to have something more modern and more aesthetically pleasing
And that is perfectly ok.
But, letting Zuneprefs (which control all things related to ZUNE/MUI) keep track of the default Workbench colors (which is not ZUNE/MUI) is just plain wrong imho.
I am aware that there is currently no perfect solution. Just as the classic Workbench allowed you to change the color palette, you can do the similar thing for AROS.
And just as with the classic Workbench, you need to use another utility to 'load' (or 'lock') the color palette on startup (aminet is full of these utilities).
For AROS we have my own SetPenColor utility (Icaros Desktop should have a copy of it) or you can use one of cavemann' utilities which are located on the AROS archives, namely
fullpalette and
clicolor.
You can use them on s-s in order to set/load the current color pallete that is used by the Workbench (and thus, for the shell, ASL requesters, ARP requesters, etc).
If, after boot, you change the colors again, for example with rtpalette then you either need to invoke the set palette / pencolor utility again or do a reboot. On classic there is a way to actually lock the colors even when some other program tries to change the palette (see aminet for such tools for 68k).
I agree with you that AROS is in need of a palette preference program (just as classic WB did) and which allows you to see and change the WB palette, save those colors to a .prefs file so that they can be loaded (and locked) on startup (*)
(*) But that also poses a problem for instance with Magic WB, as that provides its own palette settings and locks the colors (in a rather cryptic way to prevent illegal copies of magic WB).
In order to circumvent that issue a utility something like loadWBcolors/loadWBbpallette (or a optional switch for loadwb) should allow you to 'skip' loading the default palette so that another program that requires to set its own palette can do so.