I can confirm both the pre-flash and the ramp-up blink.
The ramp-up blink doesn’t bother me too much, but the preflash drives me crazy, specially since it’s brighter than the lowest moonlight, which I have configured as my D3AA memorized brightness, so it always turns on at moonlight, and then I can ramp it up – by simply keeping the button pressed – to whatever brightness I need for each case. It’s really disturbing,
I made a movie of the effect, here it is: https://i.imgur.com/e70UrIV.mp4
This is certainly my biggest complaint about the D3AA, and the main reason it won’t be replacing my good-old 3-year-old TS10v1 as my main EDC light.