The 'banding' I was referring to is the horseshoe-shaped bright band, caused by the off-centre positioning of a pilot light bulb in a regular headset layout.
I admit it'd be nice to have a 40-degree beam that was bright all the way across, but if it takes 16x the power that a 10-degree beam would take, for the moment, I'll stick with a relatively narrow beam, and move my head around a little more
There are some situations where more light would always be useful, but it depends how common those situations are, and what the cost is of having less light.
Not everyone *is* happy with moderate-power lights, but the fact that many of my users run at less than full power for much of the time does at least mean that some people are fine trading light for battery life, even on a light that's already fairly frugal at full power, and when batteries would last multiple trips.
I guess I (and some others) treat variable-power lights pretty much like carbides, and turn them down when the power isn't needed. Even running on recharagebles on short trips, where more light would cost nothing, I still
spend little time on full power. Turning the light up where necessary, I find it just isn't on full power very often.
Some modern smart chargers will cope with 1-4 cells, though personally I just charge 6 cells as 2s and 4s, and split to get 2 sets of 3, and manually discharge them individually before recharging to make sure they're all charged from fully flat whatever their history of discharge in use, and that seems to work fairly well.