"But what's the difference between qualia and what you call an "individual rendering of reality"?"

Qualia presuppose that when certain parts of brain are fired up, a certain objective qualitative experience is triggered. Individual rendering of reality is just what the term says — an arbitrary representation that is relative to person's private symbolic vocabulary and correlated to consensual description of reality as present within specific culture. In other words, if I would use the term qualia at all, I would say that they are learned and not hardwired.

"we know they're somehow closely tied to brain states. That's the hard problem."

Yes. I like to say that the hard problem of consciousness can be also described as elusive problem of perception. But as I said, the “point” where observer (consciousness) meets observable (phenomena) is predicted to be impossible to understand or interpret. And frankly, AFAICT, it's not only unobservable, it also appears utterly elusive. While consciousness is unobservable too, it is knowable (like an eye without mirror that nevertheless knows it's an eye). However, actual process of cognition seems to be a true unknowable (perhaps a better term would be “black box”). Then again, knowing that process is not essential to anything. Well, it only matters, if you aim to create artificial life aka true AI. Maybe its status of being unknowable is a sort of fail-safe :D