I'm a runtime person. For this very reason I've abandoned incandescent handheld lights almost altogether. The remaining holdouts are all Surefires that I'm slowly devising plans to LED-ify. As far as tints goes, until recently I've never really cared about tints, so long as they're not warm tints, as our minds compensate for subtle variances in tints and, to my eyes, most of my cool white lights register as white. It's when I compare two beams side-by-side that I can see the differences. That has changed, however, because of the Nichia 219. With the 219 I literally have seen the light. I cannot stand warm tint LEDs because all those years of quickly fading alkaline D-cells in my old Mag 2D or Mini-Mags has taught me that when the color of the light turns to amber that it's time to change the batteries. It gives me a headache trying to resist instinctively changing the batteries on a warm tint LED light so I avoid them.
As far as high power incandescents are concerned, I agree that incandescents are still kings in terms of ultimate output, but, I don't care about crazy output. My brightest light puts out 650 OTF lumens and I rarely use it. Incandescents make better throwers because they can be collimated better, but, my 650 OTF lumens light, which is not specifically a thrower, can out throw my M4 due to raw output alone and it'll do it for three times longer and it can be dimmed down for close in work. I've handled a few hotwire incans and they're impressive. They're just not for me.
