I don't know. It seems so obvious. There doesn't seem to be any tool to change screen brightness except a 3rd party widget for nvidia. I don't have any machines with nvidia cards. I also am not crazy about 3rd party plugins for my app software, let alone the OS.

The keyboard settings work ... even on my netbook with the infamous cedarview architecture ... but they don't give fine enough control.

Again, this seems like such a no brainer. Especially on a system (KDE 4.8.something) with so dang many features. I've barely scratched the surface.

Am I missing something ridiculously simple here?

Some brightness controls should be available from the battery applet, in the system tray.
Note that their level of granularity is limited to what is permitted by the hardware and it's drivers - which must expose the appropriate interfaces.

Oh dear. You're right. Oops.