The big advantage of an aspheric lens and single LED is the good quality of the light field, that is, “sharper” light with consistently sharp shadows and even brightness. With many (if not all) reflector and TIR solutions, the shadows are softer in the center and sharper in the spill, which makes objects less clear (need more light to see more), plus the horrible fried-egg-symptom, which is absent in properly designed aspheric.
Throw is sacrificed, though. Now comes the question, how much of throw is needed?
Could enough throw be accomplished with a more throwy aspheric, that gradually gives more brightness towards the center? But beware of crossing rays which will make chaos shadows again, so the design has to be extremely HQ. Unfortunately, no uniform light any more with this design.
My vote is definitely for single flat field aspheric per single LED, drop the throw.
Now we could think about adding out-of-focus “spill” LEDs around the main center LED, an oversized aspheric with more throwy characteristic, but then the spill would have this “crazy shadows” symptom. A COB ring? Manufacturing, no standard part.
Now with zoomability: A traditional zoomie is an inferior solution and it would mean to reboil the same nasty soup again.
What about an electromagnetic zoom with moving internal lens?
This leads towards projector-type optics, but will render a fantastic light field quality and very little loss of output (4-6%) in all zoom positions, make the head slightly longer and more complex, but would allow massive performance that totally downs any LEP.
Imagine real sustained 2000lm zoomable in a 21700 size maybe 12cm x 3cm square bar without external moving parts except the switch/es (and the USB-C cover).
Or how about two systems, one for clean wide angle and one for throw? This would double the cost for LEDs and lenses, add cost to the driver, restrict to a side-by-side “two eyes” design. Again leaning towards the rectangular flat shape.
Round LED dice. Absolutely a +1.