making big sur’s display better behaved

When both of my MacBook Pros updated to Big Sur, a set of defaults landed on my machines that made increased the desktop contrast making everything too dark and contrasty for me to work with effectively and efficiently. The ability to fix that wasn’t in the usual System Preferences locations of General, Desktop & Screen Saver, or Dock & Menu Bar. The controls were in Accessibility:

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to set it this way, but it makes a dark mode desktop look like crap. When I updated my 2019 MBP to Big Sur, I had a number of issues including the lousy dark desktop. It took me forever to figure out how to change this, and it kept me from updating my older mid-2015 MBP. This is what it looks like with everything unchecked and set back to zero:

It might not look like much, but he really big differences are in the Dock and top menu bar backgrounds, which become transparent and pick up wallpaper colors. Semi-transparent panels in windows look semi-transparent, not black. Like I noted above, I have no idea why it was set to these values on my two MBPs, and I also tremendously dislike how the controls are in a non-intuitive location. These should be in Display; even the subsection in Accessibility is called Display!