I also tried 128 across the board for grey, and it just made a dull fade which may be the best I can do with my method.
I think it may simply be because rather than have palletes controlled by rgb, I load predrawn sprites using sfml's sprite and texture classes. So the default rgba is 255,255,255,255 - so I have a sidequest to figure out the RIGHT WAY of applying rgb changes to predrawn sprites.
It may very well be a simple matter of "sfml does it differently" or perhaps having grey variants of all sprites and toggling. I feel there has to be a way to accomplish the fade to grey programmatically. Fun little dive tho! I'll have to post an update when I figure it out.
But rather than do that and cache them for timing triggers, I kind of like the scaling down by multiplication approach.
Edit: manipulate the rgb values that is - I wouldnt have converged on those hard values on my own.