which are solid plastic, not painted, correct?

ionized and painted according to Sennheiser

No.

They also announced the JT1, an open back dynamic headphone. No graphs though, and for the price of 80~ USD it’s competing against the SHP9500 and 9600 so personally don’t have very high hopes for it but we’ll see

This honestly, the hifiman eggs tuning are basically the antithesis of the kiwi ears; bright, shrill and aggressive as opposed to warm,smooth and relaxing. Personally I disliked all hifiman eggs with the stock tuning (1-2k hole followed by 3k peak and elevated af treble makes absolutely nothing sound tonally correct to my ears, except for electric guitars), so give it some time, but if you still disliked it after that then the XS is just not for you.

Alternatively you could EQ like you did with your kiwi ears.

They better not do the Aria dirty like they did with the Starfield 2