>Personally I find the bright red that CF defaults to as
>incoming now to be perfect. Each computer screen shows color
>very differently, and especially the normal ansi blue is
>extremly hard to read on my screen against the black
>background.

ANSI blue is too dark in most cases, I agree.

>I suspect your screen has a very bright color
>setting if you find the light red to hurt your eyes.

My settings are normal. And I have several monitors + notebook screen.

> I even use normal bright white as the "general text color",
>and it is not very bright and suits me fine.

I guess that your monitor is too dark
Using shades gray instead of pure white is very common in the computer world. Especially for text on black background.

>Oh and I find it much harder to catch something important that
>happens with a color. Its much easier to echo it in cyan like
>#echo *** Bash protection down!! ***

That's how people did it in 90th, when they had no colors.
I assume that each man has its own preferences, though it still confuses me why would some people prefer to read twice as much text and find it easier to read. I guess it's just old habit (which is possible to correct, actually).

I have seen setups like:

Your bash misses
**** BASH MISSES ****

For me it is easier to color the original message instead of repeating it twice and increase the spam.