shrug I don't know enough about blender :( Over the last week, I just taught myself barely enough blender to bake a uv and export to obj. I have a feeling it's probably something about the export process and/or baking a UV impacting the color of the material being exported.
Thank you for the attempt to help, I'm ok with colors being different, as I am settling on workflow using a uv texture for each mesh, not multiple materials.