When going beyond that, the colors really need to be configurable on the application.
That's the thing though, setting bg color opens up a lot of options, and constraining to invert is not sufficient in my opinion.
Eh. Doing green/red text color with default background, maybe inverted works amazing for me. In fact, I'd say that every sensible colour scheme for a terminal should have as the default foreground/background colours something that is more or less contrasting against every other explicitly named colour, including black and white (I personally have #212121 on #EEEEEE).
For example like Mutt does: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#color
I want to be able to switch existing terminals with existing applications between themes.