As for this board....it uses higher CRI diode...why is anyone surprised it's not pushing the limits of output???...its just the nature of the beast working with high CRI chips.
They are a filtered spectrum, not a better light source.
Adding red to a 80cri will raise the CRI...BUT so will taking away/filtering yellow/green/blue.
My understanding is light is not "filtered" per se, but rather "converted", with subsequent radiometric losses that end up as heat instead of light.
Blue light (or ultraviolet, as in the case of SSC's Sunlike) is emitted at a constant wavelength. These waves of energy are absorbed by different phosphors (for simplicity green, red - and blue, in the case of violet pump LEDs), which are excited and change state, giving off radiation of a longer wavelength, thus converting "blue" light to green and yellow and/or red.
Shorter wavelengths contain more energy. When absorbed and re-emitted as longer wavelengths, the difference in energy is expressed as heat. This is where efficiency is lost.
Some of the original blue (or violet) light passes through the phosphor and is not absorbed, and therefor continues on its way as the original blue spectrum. Which is why blue pump LEDs have a large blue spike, and the remainder is absorbed and re-emitted as green (including yellow) and red.
To get high CRI LEDs, you need to shift some green-yellow to red, and it also helps to broaden the visible spectrum. I don't pretend to know much more about it than that. All I know is that when comparing CRI70, 80, 90, 95, 98 etc LEDs, you tend to see a progressive shift towards the red end of the spectrum at the sacrifice of green and yellow.
More red and less green-yellow obviously hurts luminous output (in terms of the way humans perceive "brightness"). Converting more blue light to red also results in less efficiency, as the energy discrepancy between short-wave and longer wavelength light increases.
The tradeoff is that plants photosynthesis longer wavelengths more efficiently, with red considered the most efficient in terms of quantum yield (amount of energy converted to leaf mass). Here's one such study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095554/
There's plenty of info on this site and elsewhere as to the differences in photosynthetic efficiency of blue, green and red light, but the short answer is, predominantly red, mixed with some green and some blue, consistently produces the best results - with the ratio of green-red less important than the ratio of blue to green-red.
It also depends on the species of plant, but red is even more important in flowering and fruiting species, than in leafy greens (in terms of end yield: flowers/fruit vs leaf mass).
The real question is: is the sacrifice in efficiency in high CRI or warmer kelvin LEDs offset by the increased efficiency of photosynthesis?
For what we've seen - at least, in cannabis - the answer is, higher CRI (not strictly the higher CRI, but rather the red shift) appears to produce the same or higher yields in less time than lower CRI (or "bluer") LEDs.
We've been observing this phenomenon since the old MH vs HPS days. These days we also have CMH, but by all accounts, HPS still outyields CMH. Where CMH and MH have an advantage over HPS is in UVA/B output, which increases oil (terpene) and cannabinoid production. For this reason, a lot of old-time commercial growers used to mix HPS and MH at a ratio of about 2:1, and to this day, many growers still mix HPS with CMH.
Back to high CRI, there is also an argument that full-spectrum LED targets more photoreceptors on the plant, which drives photosynthesis more efficiently. So the more "even" the spectrum, the more light energy the plant can use. As we all know, sunlight has a very even spectrum with no real peaks and troughs like you see with LED, HID and fluorescent lights etc.