I haven't mentioned the small emitter and SMO reflector combo in relation to the throw ability, just the beam pattern, well, more like.. the "Hot-Spot pattern" if I could call it so.. the Hot-Spot shape, definition. The smaller the emitter, the fuzzier the Hot-Spot. Indeed, the OP reflector will smooth out the whole beam, but at a cost. And for me that's not the cost of the throw, but the smoothed out Hot-Spot, which with a small emitter it's even more pronounced than say a bigger emitter like an XHP50 / XHP70 for example. I'll always take some artifacting and a sharp, defined, homogeneous Hot-Spot over an overall smooth beam. That being not talking about outer ringing artifacts or other such unwanted beam "elements" which have nothing to do with the reflector being OP or SMO Anyways. Having an OP reflector it's like applying a post-processing blur pass over a CGI image in order to mitigate aliasing.. instead of using an actual antialiasing process. You end up losing all relevant detail in the picture by the time the blur is strong enough to make a difference in alleviating the unwanted aliasing. It's pretty much the same with the beam on a flashlight. I just like it sharp and crisp, with a homogeneous Hot-Spot especially and regarding artifacting, that shouldn't be there in the first place on a quality well though light. If there's artifacts in the beam, then something has been poorly designed, either the reflector geometry, the emitter's centering tolerance, the protective glass lens, the bezel holding it in place, or any other such elements that I'm not probably aware of. OP reflector really isn't anything but a strong gaussian blur applied to an HD image as far as I'm concerned. Nothing in relation to throw, regardless of what degree it affects it.
EDIT:
Oh and another thing that someone's already mentioned before, and nothing new in the flashlights world, if I'd ever want a smoother overall beam, it's very easy to add some form of diffusion to the light's beam, being it a film over the lens, or a rubber/silicone cap, or whatever else that would work, the option is always there. Not so much an option to sharpen the beam back, (Hot-Spot especially) when you have an OP reflector to begin with. Even a ceiling/wall/floor bounce would help if you need any diffuse/ambient lighting and you don't have any difuser on you in any such situations where you would need it, it's just handy in any situation, just point the light in a different direction than what you need to lighten up and you have ambient/diffuse light, even more so that you would have with an OP reflector. So, basically an OP reflector really isn't like.. "needed".. other than for plain aesthetic purposes, just so one could say the beam pattern is smooth/er than it was before - note that for any given artifact, the artifact would still be there, but just blurred out - e.g. outer ringing - thus smoothing out the whole beam, isn't that effective in the first place, just makes the beam more.. "bland", less eye-popping let's say, definitely not adding up anything to it. It's like instead of cleaning the mud that the children left on the kitchen floor when they've entered the house straight from the garden on a rainy day, you would take the dry mop and just spread the mud as evenly as you can across the entire floor's surface, that's all an OP reflector is.