Color on model year

if we have color as text, then we can use more descriptive colors. I noticed that's what autos do. it's a tradeoff of normalizing colors versus have the fancier names.

Yeah, I agree.  If bikes have descriptive names like cars, then it makes sense to go back to text.

Is it ok to add fancy colors to the color type? I added some kind of fancy black for the bontrager crankset.

How about inputting the colors as "", or if that doesn't disambiguate multiple colors from the same company enough, ""?

For example, the FCR2 model of Giant Fitness/FCR series comes in two colors: Brushed Silver and Brushed Purple. If every Giant bike of Brushed Silver is of the same color, I would name the color topic "Giant Brushed Silver" in Freebase.

Also, you really need a "Bicycle Paint Color" type that would have, in addition to the color name, the manufacturer color code, models the color is available in, etc. You may want to take a look at spatialed's Motorcycle Paint Color type.