Do you program in black or white?
there: i had a vt510 connected to an openbsd machine in my bedroom about 10 years ago and did most of my unix work with it.  since it can't display colors, i setup mutt, vim, tin, epic, etc. to only use bold/underline/reverse attributes for highlighting instead of different colors.10 years later and i'm now using openbsd on a laptop and typing in an xterm instead of a vt510, but i still only use bold/underline/reverse in all of those terminal apps.  however, i did switch from grey text on a black background on the vt510 to black text on a white background in xterm, but that's probably just because it's the default on openbsd.