I just want a sane non-enthusiast light with Anduril, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Sane = among other things, no thermally unsustainable modes, no gratuitous battery incompatibility, and no excess mass added to the light just for heat sinking.

That's why the current generation of "enthusiast lights" uses switching drivers for higher efficiency. The Z1 is only slightly longer than the ZebraLight SC65, which is one of the smallest 18650 lights available.

It doesn’t seem to me that any enthuisiast Anduril lights have seen real effort to make the lights small. They just don’t like button tops.

Oh, they do. Maybe you should take a closer look at their construction.

If you want a short light, try the FFL Z1 that is to be released soon.

All Wurkkos 18650’s that I’ve gotten so far have been button tops, so I expect the 21700’s are similar.

Don't assume, it's easy to find photos of the batteries online. What do you see?

I do seem to remember that button top 18650’s don’t fit in my D4v2 but maybe I’ll try again to confirm.

Sure, if you want to crush your driver. The flashlight is made for flat top batteries.

I had thought maybe flat tops enabled more contact area between the spring and the battery, but looking at some springs it doesn’t seem that way.

The button adds a little bit of resistance, but it's negligible.

Still, many “enthusiast” lights are chonkers already, so why insist on flat tops? For that matter, all 21700 lights are chonkers by almost by definition (people wanting compact lights use smaller batteries).

And many enthusiast lights are built as compact as possible considering their performance. The head has a minimum size to host the emitters and driver, but the battery tube can stay short. 21700 lights allow for more capacity, allowing longer runtime or higher current draw with only slightly larger size.

The standardization of “standardized” battery sizes tbh seems pretty poor. I’d expect all 18650’s to be 65mm long, and so on. But they vary considerably.

All 18650 cells are 65mm in length. But third party manufacturers can add extras like buttons and protection circuits, making them longer.

Anyone know what the deal with this is? Is it just lumenitis? It also occurs to me to call that “lumen bloat”, similar to Javascript bloat. I’m an experienced enough user to not care about that any more.

What do you mean? Button vs flat top has nothing to do with the performance of the light. The button is just an extra piece of metal spot welded on the positive terminal. Some flashlights require buttons for mechanical reverse polarity protection and some flashlights are built as compact as possible and thus require flat top batteries.

For a headlamp I prefer a floody beam since if I want to check out something in the distance, I can pull a handheld thrower from my pocket.

Beam shape and battery type are unrelated.

Boost drivers have a big advantage: Much higher efficiency, especially on low brightness. There are great examples like drivers designed by thefreeman or loneoceans. Unfortunately Wurkkos' engineers are still learning.

Is moonight done with PWM?

It's a boost driver with PWM input, probably low-pass filtered, but from what I heard it's rather unstable.