I’ve seen this light a few months ago, and basically dismissed it as too gimmicky. Having a second look now, and it does look interesting for your use case.
As you pointed out, @tactical_grizzly did a review of it: Sofirn IF23 Review – Too Many Features? – Grizzly's Reviews, and reading through it, I agree with your observations and would just like to add:
- The auto-lock is really messed up: not only it can’t be disabled as you mentioned, but it memorizes things when it shouldn’t, and fails to provide shortcuts for the most used modes. I really dislike auto-lock and disable it in all my lights and when necessary I use mechanical locking (unscrewing the head or the tail cap just a little bit to break contact), works well enough in most cases and has the added advantage of removing parasitic drain and therefore extending battery duration.
- CRI on the front channel (throw) is really bad at 60 or so as you also noted. OTOH, it has very good CRI (96+) on the side (flood) channel, so this wouldn’t be a problem for the close-by use cases where flood is normally used.
- Good moonlight levels at 0.5/2.5 lumens for the front/side channel. The one for the side channel is a little too bright for my taste, but not by too much. This is good for your bathroom use case.
- DUV is positive for both front/side LEDs and all brightness levels, and specially for the front LED, by a relatively large amount. This will tend to make its beam look quite green, which can be disagreeable for night indoor usage.
- Good LVP (so the light won’t ruin a battery by discharging it too much), good PWM (basically invisible and inaudible which is good as it tends to be annoying otherwise) and very low parasitic drain (so even if you don’t mechanically lock the light, the battery will take a very long time to be drained – over 7 years in this case). On the flop side, bad ATR aka thermal regulation (like the bad lockout, this would be really easy to fix – actually it would be fixed by default – if Sofirn had just used Anduril for this light, or at least made it possible for us to reflash it, neither would be a problem).
- Re: flashing, this pic from the review seems to show 4 pads visible inside the head, just like in the Sofirn SC28 as I pointed in my mini-review; I asked @Barry0892 and @sofirn right there whether they could be used for reflashing the light but got no response, so I’m presuming they can’t (which is quite sad, as flashing could help us overcome any and all such UI problems like the bad autolock and bad ATR on the IF23).
- The review points to some competing lights, and the Lumintop E21C looks very similar, you might want to investigate it further to see whether it has the same shortcomings pointed above. But I shoud say I like Sofirn more as a brand: Lumintop is not a bad brand (I have a Tool AA 2.0 UV from them and it’s a great little UV light) but Sofirn has presence here in BLF and interacts with us enthusiasts and this counts a great deal in my book. Anyway, here’s an in-depth review of the E21C: Lumintop E21C Flashlight Review - ZeroAir Reviews, I gave it only a cursory read but haven’t seen the author complaining about either auto-lock or ATR, so perhaps it’s an option, albeit as he points out, a more expensive one ($100 vs $32 for the IF23).
Hope this helps!