You didn't really address the crux of what he was talking about. If you come up on target, PID with your light and decide it's a no-shoot situation, then you should be coming down off target. Weapon lights are not search lights. Given this, I don't understand what ten-tap programming or an available lower setting would give you. It only has one job, which was his whole point.
If you're talking about a handheld light being tasked as a search light, at the risk of sounding trite - just use the splash instead of the main beam. I'm not sure in what context you would be at a stiff disadvantage for using the light that way
For weapon lights I agree.
For handheld lights it comes down to options. Here are a few situations where having a choice would have been nice.
1. We were out the other day looking for a rural house. My buddy had a modlite with OKW head searching house numbers on one side and I had the car spotlight on the other side. A little later he'd dropped something on the floorboard and grabbed the modlite to look for it. Inside a dark car the splash is still pretty distracting.
2. Working a welfare check turned coroner call. The initial search of the house my HL-5X was great. Electricity was off and it was dark so looking into windows, down halls, through the yard etc full power mode was great. Once we switched to cleanup/processing putting the HL-5x in lower mode to conserve battery and provide fill lighting to the room we were in was the preferred setting to save battery life.
3. Vehicle stops. An Modlite is great for a mobile spotlight on approach. But once you transition to running IDs switching to a low power mode would be handy instead using up battery, switching lights or trying to use some odd splash from the modlite.
None of these use cases are must have examples for switching mods but having more options with not dependability cost is always nice.