The only difference is the UNIst .pal files have an additional 12 bytes at the start of the file. DBFC and UNIEL had only 4.
I am manually assigning the indexed palette to the grayscaled sprites and it works well with that (I am able to automate applying any palette slot to the indexed sprites), here's the result:
I am manually assigning the indexed palette to the grayscaled sprites and it works well with that (I am able to automate applying any palette slot to the indexed sprites), here's the result: