I've experienced a similar color choosing dillema, for both text and bg colors. In my case, I wanted to choose a lighter shade of greyish/white than the default gainsboro for text, which I find too dark in my system color profile (if I recall correctly, default is gainsboro).
As those shades are limited to the Qt values
in this table, and I also wanted to keep the alternating background tones, I've opted for ghostwhite for the text, although I would prefer a slightly darker shade than ghostwhite and lighter than gainsboro. As for the alternating backgrounds, I found midnightblue and black to be a nice fit, so I've settled down with this setup:
