ETC1 texture format visualizations

I've been thinking about how to improve my ETC1 block encoder's quality. What little curiosities lie inside this seemingly simple format?

Hmm: Out of all possible ETC1 subblock colors in 5:5:5 differential mode, how many involve clamping R, G, and/or B to 0 or 255? Turns out, 72% (189704 out of 262144) of the possibilities involve clamping one or more components. That's much more often than I thought!

Here's a bitmap visualizing when the clamping occurs on any of the 4 block colors encoded by each 5:5:5 base color/3-bit intensity table combination. White pixels signify that one or more color components had to be clamped, and black signifies no clamping:

The basic assumption that each ETC1 subblock color lies nicely spread out along a single colorspace line isn't accurate, due to [0,255] clamping. So any optimization techniques written with this assumption in mind could be missing better solutions. Also, this impacts converting ETC1 to other formats like DXT1, because both endpoints of each colorspace line in DXT1 are separately encoded. Is this really a big deal? I dunno, but it's good to know.

Anyhow, here's a visualization of all possible subcolors. First, there are 4 images, one for each subblock color [0,3]. The 2-bit ETC1 selectors basically selector a color from one of these images.

Within an image, there are 8 rows, one for each of the ETC1 intensity tables. Within a row, there are 32 small "tiles" for blue, and within each little 32x32 tile is red (X) and green (Y).