The number of paint applications aren't just budgeted per figure, but also across a single wave.  Paint can be sacrificed from one toy to give to another and it still adds up for the bookkeepers, since toys are sold to stores by case and not by individual toy.

Which probably explains vibrant Dead End here and his naked pal Airachnid, dontcha think???

Don't get me wrong.  Dead End looks like he has more paint than he has, due to how cleverly his plastic colors are broken up.  Wheeljack, from whom he was retooled, was an all-white dude, while Dead End splits up that white into dark gray and yellow.  (With Wheeljack's grays becoming orange.)  It gives the appearance of more color because, well, there IS more color.  And Airachnid's plastic was required to be almost entirely black.

But he still has a lot of paint.  For example, those painted hubcaps are usually a luxury on Deluxe Class mainline toys.  Many Transformers have them left unpainted, because, hey, that's probably the easiest thing to cut, saving you four paint applications and leaving you with, oh no, black hubcaps.  But Dead End gets to have glorious bright green hubcaps. Which are glorious.  Did I mention they're glorious?

Dead End doesn't actually have any brown, but the combination of yellow, orange, and green sure makes his dark grays look brown.  It results in him looking like a big radioactive cornucopia.  Like he's in Thanksgiving Colors, from the Nineties.  It's pretty damn striking.

Oh, and apparently he's some sort of borderline zombie vampire thing.  He didn't use to be, but whoops.

TL;DR: Way better than Wheeljack