There’s a number of reasons that they may stick with the xhp70. The 70.2 may not work well with their current drivers and they may not want to redesign them. It’s also possible they are not able to purchase a huge quantity of the new 70.2 because they are scarce at the moment. Flashlight companies can be pretty weird and hard to understand their reasoning for doing something.
The reflector height is also very important. I can shim my convoy l6 to make a donut hole with a SMO reflector and xhp50.2. I can make it go away just by changing the reflector height. So my point is that the UT03 with it’s SMO reflector might work well with the xhp70 if they just change the reflector height. It’s possible they could just change the reflector shape to also get rid of the donut hole pattern. We will just have to wait and see how the next prototype version performs.
Sorry to say this but please remove me from the list, freeme. I get the feeling it will be quite some time to fill the quota. I didn’t sign up for the Q8 and BLF-GT for similar reasons - too long between committing to buy and remembering that I had.
The Q8 is not predicted to be a big flooder. The deep reflector makes for a narrow beam, but of course there will be a lot of spill light from 6,000 lumen.