Bluntly put. You're making this much too complicated. It's certainly less
complicated than dealing with color management for print. You make a picture
that looks good on your computer. It doesn't matter how you do it. (The beauty
of POV, for me at least, is that you have almost complete control to do almost
anything you want. From photo-realism to fractals, from cartoons to caustics.)
If it looks right, it IS right. So you set the gAMA chunk in the PNG to say that
this picture was made on a system with gamma 2.2 or 1.8 or whatever so that
other systems and programs will know how to compensate. If someone's display
gamma is off, then that's a problem with their system display, not with the
picture or how it was made. If another program doesn't read it properly, that's
a problem with how it's understood not how it was written. What you are doing is
pre-correcting the correction. An example: I want to create a simple continuous
gradient from white to black so I tell POV I want a simple series of boxes or
whatever from rgb 1 to rgb 0 in, say, 10% increments. Since POV is a programming
language and not a GUI, I have to blindly tell it what I want it to do. I have
to say something like:

#local i = 0;
#while (i <= 10)
  object {box {0 1}
    pigment {rgb 1-(i/10)}
    finish {ambient 1}
    translate (i-5.5)*x
  }
  #local i = i + 1;
#end


Now what do I get? Not a straight, smooth, gradual gradient from light to dark
but a parabolic curve of values from light to slightly darker but still light to
abruptly skewed to black. It's the relative relation of values not the
brightness that's off. This is not what I asked it to do and if this is how it
will be then you have to change the language to say it differently. As if you
can make something smaller by measuring it with a ruler made longer.

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