This turned out to be very simple to fix in the BIRT Designer. All that was needed was a custom theme with the following Highcharts.js needed to style it:
color: {
linearGradient: [0, 0, 0, '100%'],
stops: [
[0, '#FCB314'],
[1, '#EF6F00']
]
}
The crucial piece of this was the addition of the 100% when specifying the gradient in the first place.