legonick22:
Lower brightness is kind of a good thing for me--my LEDs are blinding!
Many of today's LEDs are vastly more efficient than the original 20th century ones. But a lot of "circuit recipes" are from the old days. People wanted to get as much brightness out of them as possible because they weren't very bright to begin with. So the circuit values reflected a close to maximum "safe" value. 20 mA was very common, since a lot of LEDs had max current of 25 or 30 mA.
As the efficiency of many LEDs now allows outputs in the range of 1000-2000 mcd (even for a 3mm), the old circuits produce a somewhat blinding light if those are used. Sometimes this is a good thing. If it's just an indicator light, sometimes that's overwhelming.
I got on my thinking hat, and started using less current. It worked so well, I started to aim for the most efficient LEDs I could find. It really benefited some circuits by using less power, and loading outputs less. Sometimes I could even get away with a 10k resistor at 5V, and get about the same brightness that a 1984 LED gave with 270 ohms (in fact, that was for a 1984 computer restoration project).
People should stop blindly copying old circuits and look around at what's available today.