Not brighter at startup, but being fully regulated makes up for it a bit. You have the D18 at ~14,000 lumens with SST-20 5000k/6500k and the M44 with 9520 lumens. That's a noticeable but not massive difference in perceived brightness, and once the batteries get down to ~3.8v (which happens faster on the D18) the M44 will still do 9520 lumens, or very close to it, while the D18 drops to ~9000 lumens and will continue to drop as the battery drains. The M44 would beat the D18 even more with the batteries at ~3.6v.
Additionally, the M44 will likely sustain higher brightness long term due to the more efficient driver that handles heat better. The D18 sustains ~1800 lumens, and the M44 will likely sustain over 2000, perhaps ~2400. But both lights are so small I wouldn't expect more than that due to thermal limitations. Also the M44 will have ~20% better battery life.
Still, I'm with you. It would be nice if he kept the D18 in production, so you have the more 'functional' M44 option and the more 'hot rod' D18 option.
Any news on a fix for long text posts? Seems to me that's a huge issue that needs to be fixed ASAP if Lemmy is going to continue to grow.
Also, I'm not a developer and I know it's a lot more complicated than this...but still, like, 50k characters is like 50kb of data. Even a small .jpg is much more than that. To be fair Lemmy isn't the only site that struggles with this, but it's weird that posting a few pages of text is a struggle anywhere in 2023.