[eviks]

> entirely personal preference

The differentiation benefit is not. Personal preference is what tool you choose to deal with spoofing, eg, you could also use a different font for different symbol ranges instead of colors.

> I've tried it and found it resulted in too many colors for my brain to assign individual meanings to

Well, you don't assign individual meaning to individual colors, but to color ranges which a given type can vary over. For example, going from green to yellow could be the range for variable names, so you associate that range with variables

Which color ranges have you tried?