After furthering testing in Maia (and a couple other systems), I must admit, this may be Frontier's issue to fix after all. Although there are color issues in other titles. That would still suggest the Rift software is playing a role.
Before you go into low "orbital cruise" around Maia A, as an example, the light from the Maia is crushing the color. When you get into mid/low cruise the colors come to "near gob smack perfection". This seems to hold on the dark side and the light side (sometimes)-weird) which shouldn't be. This close to the star, the color should be drowned out my the light (which is what I assume the lighting routine is trying to simulate). Also, as you approach the surface, the dark side lights up and the background colors bump as well. There is something wrong in the lighting routines and, in more than one way, it seems. If Fdevs could give us a way to have just the lighting of everything at the quality I see at the supercruise altitude mentioned, I would be ecstatic. Or at least a way to control the amount of this lighting -or turn it off till it works better.
If they could get the whole game to look like this, it would truly be a VR poster child.
This lighting progression should hold true for most planetary descents - but the lighting is different in many cases - some have distant stars etc, dimmer. Brown dwarfs throw a reddish tint over their nearby space too. Descending to planet surfaces in the dark side, ED does raise the lighting as you get closer to the surface. Its abit jarring.
I see distinct lighting zones - must just be worked off radii from the star/light source - as you move away from the star, the cockpit ambient lighting drops in 3-4 distinct steps (this could be more elegant, fading from one to the other... maybe it is a setting I have reduced?)
The original colour banding is not specific to FD or any app - its present in Lucky's Tale (particularly in browns etc), although the solid cartoony colouring tends to reduce the effect.
But the relative complexity of the lighting and shading going on in ED, coupled with the fact its a dark, dark game in general, make the banding more easily visible.
Lighting is one of the hardest aspects of rendering to get right - there are a lot of dirty tricks that get 90% of the work done for very little GPU cost - then the next 10% is an absolute pain from a performance perspective.
And because we use lighting cues for depth perception, shape, texture etc, we see problems with lighting quite easily.
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