panel bgfillcolor attributes - how to specify as 3 floats

Hi -

So, this has been driving me crazy since Max 7: The way it has dumbed down the process of picking colors for things like panel is super annoying, but ok - numbers still work. Most color attributes in Max allow you to set their values with hard numbers. For example, I can set the panel background color using this message: [ bgfillcolor 0.3 0.3 0.3 ]. However, I sometimes start by picking a color in the inspector, and then hard coding that color. However, the colorpicker tools no longer show you the color's values - which is really annoying.

Ok - but I know that if I HOOK UP the attrui object and set it up as a multi-number display, it should show me the numbers that represent the current color.

So, when I make an attriu object, call it bgfillcolor, specify that it is a multi-float display, and then hook it up to a panel object, it forces the object into single-color display mode. So, I only can manipulate the R value.

This seems like a clear bug to me. Any ideas here?