I doubt LED lighting is over. It may be over for PFO though. It's going to be tough for them to come back after all the apparent problems with their lighting and now a patent lawsuit. It will take years for all the legal stuff to be worked out by the courts. All we can do is watch and hope for the best.
If you want to read about the specifics, a search on PFO here or on "that other famous real big reef site" will yield some results you can check out.
In any case we have to give PFO a lot of credit for being the first company to market an LED lighting system for reef systems. Personally, I liked the concept, but find the lighting simply to expensive to justify itself. It is also the first generation of this type of lighting. Usually the first generation of anything is going to have a few problems to work out, For example, even a dominate company like Microsoft took at least three generations of Windows to get a product that was actually usable. Remember Windows 3.0 and 3.1? There were two releases, at least, before those.
I don't think you are going to see the price of any similar fixture be much less expensive. The cost is in building the LED arrays and that's going to be high. Typically you'd need to use high output LEDs, mount them, power them, and cool them. The elaborate control system PFO uses, isn't that expensive to build, compared to the LED arrays, and you only need one control system per unit.
With all that, I still think LED lighting for reef systems will become the lighting of choice. It's just a question of time.
