Jack, I'm almost 100% agree with your opinion. Instead of "Hard to beat good lighting..." I may write "Impossible to..." mostly because I'm not sure the fill flash will get you to the same results (well, at least I'm not very good in this, I always see some differences that I personally don't like).
On other hand there are situations when if you don't shoot you just go home with nothing! And I think there are some folks around who need to get that shot, no matter how fine it will look as a picture (by one or other reason). Alan is Alan and he loves to show what his equipment is able to do (and stretching the boundaries time to time...). Is that useful here in the forum? I think so (well, I'm sure so): despite the photos are hardly competing with photos taken in proper light, they are still
photos taken home and for some purposes they are 100% good enough. All this is an info that may help the guys who are after the object at any price. I'm not sure Alan is doing this exactly by the same reasons
but it works there well enough...
I'm not very sure if I succeed to express myself good enough (in English) and it's just my opinion. Could be interesting to see what others are thinking about that anyway?