Monolith, the belts are looking good so far, but you're right, none of them are grabbing me either. I'm still liking the black belt I have now best from all this. Maybe I'll send you my blue belt for you to play around with as well. See what starting blue does for your experiments.
But I like how you're gonig about this
have you tried taking one of the dyed belts and then redying it? perhaps a number of dye jobs will do the trick (not that this would make it easy for us lol)