Marianne, thank you for your measured and well structured argument, I side with a lot of what you mention here and I, as I believe so do you, feel this is endemic of all CMS. As I mentioned to Julie, if we decide to use SharePoint for more than document management, it is a safe bet that we will be rolling our own UI and I can say for certain that we will be taking that which you describe as the most successful path.
Now, I have a strong suspicion that you have tackled SharePoint in the past (or an equivalent) and have experience of crafting your own UI within it, overcoming pain-points and working to its constraints. I would be extremely interested to hear from you on this.
Lastly, I am not sold on Julies link issue being antithetical to common UX practice. I believe Julie added some valuable insight in to types of issues that must be overcome. In using different colours for user types, as long as correct semantic information is integrated, alongside further accessible text, use of colour in the manner suggest is okay IMO. Just make sure that grey text meets WCAG 2 contrast levels Image may be NSFW.
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