25% to 33% is fine for “tactical use”, but no good for light painting (with various tools attached to the light) where 50% is the sweet spot for visual effects. I have a comparison photo in my S2+ review. It is a rapidly increasing market segment.
Right. This is unrelated to the FW3A, but I have an entirely different firmware in progress which will probably be a lot more interesting for light painting. It uses a RAGB quad-color setup and lets the user configure a reasonably wide variety of lighting patterns in a manner similar to how analog synthesizers let people sculpt sounds. It’s, um, simpler than an analog synth, but the general concepts are basically the same. If you want to oscillate suddenly between two different states with a 50% duty cycle (like a strobe), simple, tell it what those two states are and configure it to do a square wave between them. You can also overlay another waveform simultaneously, with a different shape/frequency/intensity, if you like. For example, it’s easy to make a police flasher this way — slow square wave between red and blue plus a fast square wave between dim and bright. But plenty of less-jarring combinations are possible too.
The intent is for use in a lightsaber, to paint neat-looking patterns in the air while swinging it around. I’d imagine it should work pretty well for more general light painting too.
The cut-and-hold thing can be done, though it’ll cost a little extra space. It also uses up a UI action which might be useful for other things. Holding the button while connecting power might be a good way to reset to factory defaults, for example. That’s a thing which isn’t implemented at all right now, and hold-at-boot is probably the easiest way to do it. But I don’t know what would be the best UI choice for hold-at-boot.