Apparently, headlight technology hasn't evolved in 1200 years.
It has devolved in ED's Universe!
If we had normal light levels for our ships and SRVs on the darkest planets, I doubt anyone would be complaining about this change. It is the total lack of proper illumination on pitch black planets that is making them tedious to deal with, unless you are playing in the dark with no ambient light anywhere in your room.
And now after reading posts by some that are finally grasping the fact that the brighter the skybox of the night sky of a planet, the brighter the surface illumination will be, even though several of us explained that simple fact early on in this thread, it is clear that few bother to even read what others contribute to a discussion like this. So why do we bother?
Until FEDV decouples the Ship and SRV headlight output from the planetary surface light level controls, this is going to be a problem.
That is my final point on this issue. We are just going to have to deal with the mediocrity of the current lighting system in the meantime.