Reverse engineer, in the context of these new gml lights is not the right phrasing, not even close. Its like saying that BMW had to reverse engineer the T-ford because they both make cars and one made a car before the other. But they both kinda look like eachother? Yes, both lights try to spread the light around properly without blocking airflow. Also, most of them dont even look the same, hlg doesnt do bar lights.
Id argue that gmls boards are infact superior to the HLG boards: they add a separate far red channel where hlg is just one channel. Diode quality is a different thing, pretty sure hlg gets the best diodes but those gml boards dont look the same, they dont work the same as hlg boards, theres only a couple of similarities as samsung diodes and the heatsink/fixture shape of that vulcan light. You do not need to take apart or look at a hlg board in any way to get that gml board made, you can just dictate what you want down to some alibubber and they will draw the gerber file for you and populate the boards. All he did was getting his own growlight made after having worked with another growlight company.
Growmaus used to work for Chilled, and now works for HLG. Does that mean tha hlgs lights are now chilled clones? Not really.
The whole trying to find the bad guy here is a bit silly; both hlg and gml seems quite dedicated to provide good lights and good aftersales. Its just that they had a falling out. No need for anyone of us to get onto either of the new "teams", especially not cause we bought a light or something already.
Please dont construe this as me having a go at either hlg or gml, this discussion seems to have taken on that "tribal" online mode where everybody just talk past eachother and their arguments. We could just aswell settling this discussion by everybody saying "i like hlg" and the rest saying "i dont" cause the arguments being made by now dont seem to go towards the merit of thw subject, only that "i dont like those other people with those different light choices".