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I have been repainting part of my ogre force, with their predominately having been painted in rather drab browns. I have found that when painting their clothes (for example), if I use a realistic blue colour that it does not appear to look very good, but say if I choose a more camp/exaggerated brighter blue that it looks better on the table top (even though in "real life" someone wearing pants that colour would look pretty flamboyant). I have noticed this with other colours also (i.e., a flashier red colour tends to look better than a staider, darker red).

I was wondering what other people’s thoughts were in relation to this (i.e., am I the only one that feels this way or is there a consensus around this)? I was wondering whether it was a bit like with cartoons that drawing people with 5 digits on their hands looks less natural than 4, even though it is less anatomically correct.

A desaturated palette can work well, too. I don't think there's a varying difficulty to using a more saturated palette; it's a case of one's taste, and one's practice in it.

'Pop' can be achieved with either saturated or desaturated colours.

It really depends on your preferences. Some people prefer a subdued and realistic color scheme, some people prefer a more exaggerated style where all of the colors are clear from tabletop distance. But there are definitely things that need to be exaggerated no matter what style you're using. Shading almost always needs some degree of exaggeration to be visible at all, and most weathering effects tend to be heavier than they would be scaled up to the "real" model.

One reason that you might think that exaggeration looks better is that a lot of catalog picture paint schemes (especially GW's) use an exaggerated style, so it's what you're used to seeing.

Yellows look nice with Browns IMO.

My Imperial Fists have the Yellow armor and Brown bases & ammo pouches look nice.

There's a few factors at play, this isn't an exhaustive look, but just what came to my mind when reading your post.

1. Contrast. On a really small model, you tend to want to exaggerate contrast in a less than realistic manner because realistic levels of contrast tend to look too plain the smaller you go. As you make the subject larger, I think you tend to want to prefer realism over exaggerated contrast.

2. Shading/highlights. This is similar to the first point, but talking about a single colour area rather than the model as a whole. A colour will tend to look flatter the smaller you go, so you often want to exaggerate shadows and highlights.

3. Scale effect. This is where things tend to look darker the smaller the model. If you paint a small scale plane or a car model in the exact paint that is applied to the real thing, it will tend to look too dark. The links below explain it a bit. Basically the further away from an object you are, the more pale it tends to look (some explanations I've heard don't sound right, but anyway). This means on a small model, say 1/72, viewing it from 1 metre/yard away you want it to look like the real thing at 72 metres/yards away, to achieve that you need to use slightly paler colours.

I've noticed this effect if I paint a model, like a Spitfire, at 1/32 and use the exact same colours on a 1/72 model, they won't look right when I place them side by side, the smaller one will look too dark or the larger one will look too light.

Of course wargamers tend to not care so much about scale effect, and tend to prefer making colours more vibrant to compensate rather than making them more pale.

http://www.009.cd2.com/members/how_to/colour.htm
http://www.cybermodeler.com/color/scale_effect.shtml