I completely understand. A good looking end result is all that counts, the method used to produce that result is not nearly as important.

Quickly picking apart your shader, I see two color math nodes set to gain with a gray color as 2nd parameter. Set those to white and plug a math node into both of them (leave that in "add" mode). Then use the first parameter of the math node to adjust the gain, something between the 0.3 and 0.7 range should hopefully give you a result closer to what you want.