Yeah, some things have definitely changed in the time you were away. 
Given your interest in quantitative measurements, you might enjoy some of the developments along those lines. These range from simple, like using cd/lm to quantify how floody or throwy a light is… to complex and requiring additional tools, like beam profiling, spectral analysis, and the “snob index”.
Maukka and Parametrek developed a way to quantify how annoying the PWM or other oscillations are in light sources, called the Snob Index:
They also built methods for measuring the beam shape and color and various angles, as demonstrated in @maukka’s FW3A review:
@Parametrek has also created a simpler beam profiler which is easier to use with far less specialized equipment:
Colorspace measurements have become pretty common too, using spectrometers of various types. One popular type is the Opple, but it’s fairly primitive, and can only detect a few frequency bands.
People also usually do runtime graphs inspired by yours, often using a free Android app called “ceiling bounce” from @zak.wilson. However, it often seems that people have low-resolution light sensors on their phones, or maybe just don’t understand how to do gain staging, so the graphs often come out blocky. It has worked fine on both the devices I tried it on though, giving me ~13 bits of precision.
There have also been some efforts to reclassify “white” itself, to better match what people find looks good in lighting tests. This would deviate from the BlackBody Line in favor of a more perceptual curve. At low CCTs (and some “neutral” CCTs), the ideal line has a negative duv (pink bias), while at high CCTs it has a positive duv (green bias), with a pure neutral range between… because that’s what people in studies perceive as looking good.
Here’s a couple studies on that…
There’s more, of course, but that’s probably plenty for now. 