I have an APTIAL-C inbound and should receive it sometime this week so will provide some feedback then.

A buddy and I were out goofing off last night and tried the Surefire 952 IR light with the PVS-14's.  That IR light is really bright to say the least but I'll add the conditions included a lot of ambient light and there's still a little snow on the ground as well.  I think I had the gain turned down half way or more on the  -14's
and could still see fine without the IR.

It's funny we obsess over it. I've used ir light so very little since getting my gen 3 gear. So little.

When I had gen 1 stuff on the other hand...... roll out the IR spot light lol

Depends on conditions.  Last NODs class I took we went into a cave.  Even with gen 3 gear you couldn't see shit and the on board illuminator on the PVS14 didn't do much at all.  The couple of us that had extra IR lights on our helmets were way better off.  In a house after dark with little to no outside light, an extra IR could help.  Outside under starlight?  Yeah, gen 3 doesn't really need the extra IR.  

Weapon mounted?  It does help with bloom.  Outside of that?  I don't want to hold a rifle up and point it at shit just to illuminate it.

Yeah, I get your point about caves.

But maybe I just have a really really good unit? I doubt it.  Even in my garage with absolutely zero light besides one led at the opposite side of the garage, behind my car, it Le still lit up way more than enough for me to see well. Closets too.

Dunno?  It's just funny how much I obsessed over it and had to have my d2 but at the end of the day I rarely use it. I'll never probably have to take a shot over 100 meters so I could have kept my i2.

Just speaking about me of course.

Yep, on gen 3 units extra IR is not nearly as needed and often not needed at all. I till have extra IR lights on me just in case though.  

Big dark spaces react significantly differently to supplemental IR broadcast than do confined dark spaces. Navigating a large tunnel complex is way different from going room to room down a hallway of a building.

It has to do with the volume of the area and it is similar in some ways to the dB scale (and absorbtive nature of the construction material). Think about the volumetric difference between an eight foot tall ten foot wide painted hallway and a twenty foot tall forty foot wide raw concrete tunnel. Oftentimes low powered supplemental IR works very well but the failure to illuminate an area can be very abrupt.