Refactoring: make loader more readable

This refactoring has no ticket. 
I refer to changes I made against release/3.0. Until now, release/3.0 has not been merged into dev. Thus, I cherry-picked some commits from release/3.0. If more than one commit is displayed then git does not recognise these picks. Only the last commit ("makes the workflow section more readable") is relevant. 
Do the colors still need to be limited to the MS Project colors? Or was this requirement droped?