right.  i just wasn't sure that it was happening.  i was having such horrible problems with my sRGB/asRGB equation, and i knew the equation wasn't the problem but how i was implementing it.  so i had to look in the material room to see what was actually happening.  so i tried to make everything as explicit as possible, just in case.  and since i looked and only saw white, i thought that might be the problem.  and at first i thought that was taking care of it (i have no idea what went wrong with that test), but then i found that the Step function test for my conditional was just plain backwards.  since that meant a really incorrect linear transformation for most of the shader, i was getting awful, uncontrollable yellow bloom.  it turned me all around.  i questioned everything i was doing. 

so when i got myself straight, i double checked and found Matmatic and hypercolors performed exactly like i had been expecting in the first place.  but since i couldn't see that, i didn't know it.  so i thought i'd explicitly mention it, in case someone had a similar problem.