I’ve been meaning to finish writing the Wikipedia page about the Munsell system, especially the woefully inadequate history section, for more than two years now, but never get around to it; in any case, feel free to leave feedback about its current state.
The Munsell color space is apparently more intuitive than even HSV (Hue is always intuitive but I'm having a hard time predicting the effect of changing Saturation and Value sometimes). It relates strongly to the way we actually perceive color because it's defined in those terms.
I've been meaning to use it for some time but last I checked, it seemed encumbered by patents and that the only way was to use some proprietary programs you have to pay for... I didn't know these data mapping files were available!
HSV is not very “intuitive” at all, being an RGB cube, turned on one corner and then squished a bit into a cylinder. It’s still dependent on the mostly arbitrary (with respect to human perception) geometry of whatever RGB input/output device is being used.
In HSV, colors of the same “hue” generally have slightly different apparent hues (and the particular difference depends on the RGB space chosen), and worse, difference in hue angle has little correspondence to perceptual difference between hues, so that if you try to “rotate” the hue of an image you distort all of the hue relationships therein.
But you’re right that it doesn’t butcher hue as badly as the other color attributes, which are not remotely close to perceptually uniform.
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As for Munsell, it’s basically just a big look-up table, rather than being defined by formulas (as, e.g., CIELAB or CIECAM02 are). So if you have the OSA renotation data from this link, you pretty much have just as much to go on as anyone does. Figuring out how to interpolate that look-up table isn’t totally obvious, I suppose, but it’s not the hardest thing in the world either.
If you want to use your computer’s existing color space conversion stack with the Munsell data, Bruce Lindbloom made a look-up-table-based ICC profile that will round trip CIELAB to what he calls “UP Lab”: http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?UPLab.html
I discovered Munsell color space yesterday. It would seem to have amazing applications in graphic design, cartography, etc. I'm surprised it's not more widely recognized.
The best color science resource I know of online is Bruce MacEvoy’s website, http://handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html and those interested in the Munsell system in particular should see this page: http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color7.html
I’ve been meaning to finish writing the Wikipedia page about the Munsell system, especially the woefully inadequate history section, for more than two years now, but never get around to it; in any case, feel free to leave feedback about its current state.