| It's amazing how widely people vary on light. It's observable across major cultures, or even different families. A Japanese IKEA I went through recently had a display which would allow you to switch between 'Japanese' style lighting' and 'Western' style, with western style being dimmer, and with warmer color temperature. I immediately found the Western one more comforting, relaxing, while my wife (Japanese) prefers the brighter one. Internal lighting in Japan is almost uniformly overhead neon, without the baffles you'll see in many North American offices. I've grown used to it, but would rather work in the dark. I'm sure there are many people that, like you, feel that these LED bulbs are too dim. If you're at all curious though, I'd recommend that you find one and give it a shot, many of them /feel/ brighter than the numbers would lead you to expect when compared to an incandescent. It might be better to compare on the basis of Lumens, as watt's are a measure of power instead of brightness[1]. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb |
Ditto for "desk lamps" that can't evenly illuminate two Letter-sized sheets of paper side by side (the typical dimensions of an open textbook), let alone the whole desk. To this day I still don't understand why students buy those. Maybe they just put them on their bedside tables in case they need to find their way to the bathroom at night.
On the other hand, everyone's computer screen is too bright for me. My screens are usually set to 25%-40% brightness unless I'm using it outside on a sunny day. So I suppose people do have varying tastes about illumination.