I agree completely.
Properly dimmable mains replacement LED lamps are the bain of my life.
Phase chopping mains and feeding that into a tiny power supply to drive LED elements that actually run at about 1.2Vdc is never going to end well.
The VERY best results for LED dimming happen when the 12Vdc or 24Vdc power is “dimmed” (PWM) and then fed into LED ‘lamps’ or strips that have little more than a resistor and an LED elements.
I’ve found 12Vdc LED lamps, in Par16 housings, which have MR15, MR11, GU5.3 connections which have far too many electronics in the base, so they are trying to smooth out the supply, which utterly defeats the dimming.
As a way to resolve this, I’ve built some individually addressable Par16 lamps based on SK6812 GRBW chips, that openHAB2 can drive with the DMX binding.
The second batch is about to be sent to a customer next week.
They are only 1Watt per lamps, so you’ll need more lamps to get a really bright area, but the point of them is that the dim curve is incredibly smooth and the low level truly low.
Whilst the colour temperature is completely tunable.
These videos show them in action -
