I'll see if there's somewhere that I can get the SainSmart display at a good price then. It's probably worth sticking with ST7735 devices, as it will minimize the amount of porting and code changes that I will have to do to migrate my project to the ESP32.
I'll just keep my "blue" 128x160 display in my box of unassorted Arduino parts, maybe I will be able to put it to use in a future project after all. It does seem to work, but it's not right for this project here.