Sometimes when I go outside and fire up some of my better incandescents, and am greeted with wonderful full spectrum light, I sometimes say to myself, is there something that I'm missing here? Am I the only one that still enjoys the quality of light these breed of illumination tools produce I ask myself? The LED forum rolls on and on, with new post's every single day about the latest and greatest LED lights, yet the incandescent forum sometimes feels like a graveyard.
It's sad that so many scoff at the notion of using an incandescent flashlight because they look at some spec sheet and say "this many lumens for only that long? I can get an LED that does triple that!", when unfortunately they don't seem to understand there is more to the story than numbers on a spec sheet. Not all lumens are created equal.
I can fully appreciate where you're coming from - I used to work in an automotive paint shop. "Eyeballing" a color match is frowned upon in the industry (there's computer formulas for this), but those only go so far, and sometimes you don't have a choice. When that happens there is only ONE light source to use - the Sun. Not even the best incandescent artificial lighting can suffice there.
It really just comes down to needs. If I needed to track blood, identify the color of a suspect's shirt WITH PRECISION, or do any serious "color sensitive" work with a flashlight I'd go high performance incandescent right now.
But for me, and most flashlight users, we're better off with high lumens and runtime without the hassle of lithium ion batteries/chargers, filaments that break, sourcing bulbs, etc.
The fact that LED is "taking over" is not a random thing - it is happening not just for a reason, but a multitude of reasons.
LED (for most of us) is just simply more practical.
Throw a couple of IMR16340's in there and you're good to go. Just make sure not to discharge the batteries too far.
