Yeah, I at least intuitively embrace qualia and I can't really help it.

"There seems to be no grounding for thinking that "what you would call blue" exists in any real sense. Your eyes (and mine) absorb some photons, some rods/cones fire off some signals down dome nerves, and a cascade of synaptic events passes through areas of the brain. There is no "blue" or "red" anything at any point."

What about the so-called "arbitrariness worry"? Why is my experience of color what it is instead of some alternative that allows for equal discrimination (spectral-inversion is the easy example). What accounts for the fact that I experience blue the way I do as opposed to some other way that isn't even a color I see at all? All that matters for survival is discrimination. I certainly doubt you'd posit that those colors really exist in the external world.

And preemptively, before you get too defensive, keep in mind I'm basically asking you to convince me otherwise, I'm not trying to prove you wrong.