>I was just surprised and disappointed at how many people assumed that paper had an unbeatable advantage on the purely visual aspects of presenting information, as if computers were still limited to 100dpi with really poor black levels.

I'm not surprised. Virtually all "designers" think low contrast text is better, despite high contrast being preferred on paper. They deliberately reduce contrast by setting the text color to gray. Even Firefox's Reader View, which otherwise fixes most mistakes of designers, sets the text to gray unless you override it in userContent.css. Desktop GUIs often have low contrast text too, which is also difficult to fix. Unless somebody somebody knows how to do this their expensive monitor will be wasted.