Considering that brainfuck only has 8 characters and models are scoring at 6.2% I don't think tokenization is the issue

The only issue. *

Reasoning is hard, reasoning about colors while wearing glasses that obfuscate the real colors... even harder... but not the core issue if your brain not wired correctly to reason.

I suspect the way out of this is to separate knowledge from reason: to train reasoning with zero knowledge and zero language... and then to train language on top of a pre-trained-for-reasoning model.