In my late teens we discovered an ad in the back of Popular Science touting "the world's most powerful flashlight". We had to purchase a case of the six D-cell monsters with a 4" glass reflector. On a lark, I joined the group purchase and I wasn't disappointed. Need to spot something 100 yards down the road? -- no problem. Drop the thing in a pool -- no problem (don't take it diving). Now, it will be done with cellphones or wimpy little LED things, but back then there were occasional "flashlight wars". With this beast, it wasn't much of a contest, the war would abruptly end after I ignited my torch. (think kitchen knife facing an automatic weapon) I kept this weapon under the driver's seat and I could give a tailgater with high beams blaring a bright message. In the end, the flashlight was stolen from my car and, as you can see, I still miss it.

I've gone through a few LED's, including Maglite Mini's. So far my favorite was a "REDLINE" that I picked up in a hardware store, but it's battery holder disintegrated after a couple years. I had a similar issue with a Mini where a conductive carbon path developed in the battery holder, causing the batteries to run down after a few days. Currently, I'm using a Duracell model that works OK, but the power switch is too easy to press and just bumping it my pocket turns it on and runs down the batteries.

Yes, I hate the flash mode. I don't understand the rationale behind that feature. It seems to me that they were running the LED in pulse mode and at that point, adding the flash was a cheap feature and an easy way to differentiate an LED model from its incandescent competition. The early LED models were very dim and had terrible optics -- but they could flash.