Interesting thread Zes, thanks for the perspective.
I used Maglites for a long time, and bought one of the first LED upgrade bulbs. It was blue.
For me, one of the worst things about that era, other than low lumens, was having to conserve battery usage. Going from standard to alkaline when Duracells came out seemed like a big advancement, although the price jumped also. Replace Ds in a 5 or 6 cell light a couple times and it equaled the price of the light ... and you start turning it off when you don't really need it. For me, moving to rechargeable AAs, and then 18650s was huge.
I hadn't thought about how quickly the LED explosion really evolved, but it sure is nice.
JT