How to rule out culprits for odd prompt rendering behaviour before filing a formal issue?

[myrmeleontidae]

Essentially, the prompt is oddly transparent, as though it were obeying some weird opacity/transparency rule that I can't seem to find. It could just as easily be an anachronism with my hardware setup or something misiconfigured somewhere, but where, I haven't the foggiest.

(Running Linux)

$ uname -r
6.16.8-arch3-1

I liked the look of this fella's, so the config for the prompt in question is identical to his (and the screenshots herein are how I know the lack of opacity isn't by design; the commands' input and output are equally as solid and visible as the prompt)

I thought, maybe, that it was a picom issue, and so fiddled with its .conf to no avail. I tried removing picom and replacing it with xcompmgr and transset-df, but it also made no difference.

I then attempted reverting XTerm to its 16 default system colours, in case there was some conflict between it and OMP with how it processed the foreground, background, and cursor colours, leading to the weird ghostly appearance, but that didn't work either.

So... all told, let's see:

Shell: Bash
Terminal emulator: XTerm
Compositor: xcompmgr
Windowing system: X11 (in case you hadn't guessed yet, haha)
OS: Arch Linux

I'm running it on a Dell Precision 3470 laptop, and it has a handful of colour corrections that need doing down the pipeline, but this is the first time there's been some unique transparency issue, with or without a compositor or its transparency settings on or off, at that.

If anyone has any advice on what to try next, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

[myrmeleontidae]

Switched back to picom for the compositor in the meantime, and trying any number of different themes in the .bashrc line yields the same issue.

[myrmeleontidae]

So, I think it might have something to do with how XTerm handles BCE (background colour erase) and which "colour" gets used as the alpha channel when passed to the compositor. I remember fixing a similar issue with Vim.

To be honest, it's probably easier to just use a new terminal emulator entirely, haha.

And not that I'm that much of a fan of talking into the void, as it's as good a place as any to air out possibilities, but if anyone cared to chime in, I'd be grateful.