Haze is ok. He always obtained my respect (even if we badly discussed in the past, expecially about NeoGeo) and I always considered him one of the most talented in the Team. He's able to emulate a game or reproduce an unemulated part of it simply watching a YouTube video. 2D tilemap-based games have no secrets for him. Maybe he lacks the same skills when he has to emulate sound chips, as he often admitted by himself, but this was not a problem in the early days of MAME because there was really co-operation and usually was the job for another Dev add the sound part. This WAS the MAME TEAM in the Nicola Salmoria period and also when Haze was the leader of the project. What I'm saying is history, not personal opinions. Now all of this is gone, Developers' EGOCENTRISM is the real leader of the project.
About C64 palette, even a stupid should know that the C64 board has two different video output, one is the RF channel, made expecially for home TV, UHF 36 PAL. The other is a VIDEO-COMPOSITE one, that was made for the Commodore (or compatible) monitors and that you can use today with a S-VIDEO or SCART connection. The results on the screen are different, without taking in account all other factors that could influence the final output like different resistors from a board to another, different manufacturing of the VIC-II (4 revisions of it were produced before switching to the C64C hardware) and expecially that the C64 was a cheap machine made for the masses and Commodore never cared about using cheap material to produce them as fast as possible. These rules applies to the SID too, but it's a long and complex argument to touch now.