Last I checked, the light only reaches so far... Nice to be sure your lights are on before the ground rushes up and hits you...
I seem to recall some techno-babble about how using lights to illuminate the landscape around you requires a heap of processing power.
Apparently, even adding another 500m to the range of the floodlights would double the amount of coal you have to shovel into your computer or something.
I like having to keep an eye on my pitch ladder while flying in the dark.
Ideally, it might be nice if FDev implemented some kind of edge-enhancing graphical doodad to emulate a whizzy, futuristic, radar overlay on the canopy HUD.
But, yeah. a light-switch that you could see on the HUD would be nice.
At least, that way, you'd be able to easily verify it was dark because there's nothing for your lights to illuminate, rather than because you haven't got them switched on.
Also, if darkness becomes a thing in ED, can we have the floodlights as a proper "system", which takes damage and fails so the lights flicker (or stop working completely) if you bash your ship against too many things? [big grin]