To me the problem with solarized dark has always been that my brain keeps telling me that my monitor is broken as it "bleeds backlight". I like the rest of it but whenever I use it I just turn the background to more or almost completely black. So much better.
I guess the same very low contrast is a problem for the light one too. This here did not improve it.
Nowadays I mostly use something else.
I wish there was a theme generator that just took few colors and palletes on input then generated config for a bunch of apps
I took some dark theme (twilight anti-bright from emacs) and just tweaked some values to my liking (making background darker was one), then moved with same theme (manually...) to IntelliJ IDEA and few other apps
Base16 does that: https://github.com/chriskempson/base16