Plan for 256 color sprites

I am not even sure if this one is practical/possible/desirable. Discussion?

Possible method:

• Convert existing 16-color palettes into 256 color palettes with the colors rearranged so that the first row of 16 colors matches the original 16-color palette. This means a heck of a lot of big fat palettes
  • Note that 256 color sprite palettes would NOT be the same thing as 256 color master palettes. Sprite palettes would still be indexes into the current master palette, they would just be 256 elements long rather than 16 elements long.
• Convert existing graphics to 256 colors, and make them draw referencing the newly converted 256 color sprite palettes.
• Autogenerate a new 256 color sprite palette that is an exact mapping of whatever your current master palette is.
  • This could be the default for newly added sprites
  • This would be 256 color sprite palette zero in ohrrpgce.new
• New sprites could be drawn with the simple mapping, and it would be just like using the master palette.
• New 256 color palettes could still be created for palette-mangling purposes (like red-slime, green-slime, blue-slime all using the same sprite)
  • This would actually probably be a heckofa lot more useful than the current palett exchanging functionality. Suppose you make a sprite palette that has all reds remapped to greens. Then you can apply that to any sprite, and it will still work
    • ...assuming that the sprite was drawn for the new simple sprite pallete. For old converted sprites, it might not work so hot.