With choke ballast fluorescent stuff you can leave the ballast in place. Because the LED current is significantly lower than from the original tube, this gives you only a small amount of ballast losses. Ideally you'd just remove it altogether.
With HF ballasts LED tubes it's a whole special thing and you need to leave it in place. But this is a very  unwise thing to do. HF drivers last a long time but by now most of them are over 10 years old and you maybe have a reliable 10 years of life left in them. HF ballast LED tubes also cannot usually be connected straight to mains so in 10 years time you'd have to start searching for new HF fluorescent ballasts i guess.

Agreed both of you! Things do taste great fire burnt, but I’d literally eat Marshmallows in every form!

Yes, but the two meanings of "Soft White" have been present as long or nearly as long as the term itself.  For example, here is a soft white fluorescent dating back to 1946.  I believe that's around the same time as the soft white incandescent lamps were introduced, although whether the phrase was ever used prior to Q-Coat, I'm not sure.  Another ambiguous term is "Full Spectrum".  It's typically a cooler colored lamp with better color rendering than the original daylight, but there is no criteria for what spectra qualify.  One that has popped up in recent years is "Bright White", referring to lamps in the 3000K-3500K range, and is even being used by Philips now.  This is worse than some of the others given that brightness already refers to luminosity at a distance.  At least softness and even fullness don't have technical meaning the same way brightness. 

Nowadays, when people hear soft white it’s the color temperature. Back in the day, soft white actually just met the finish. A soft white bulb had a soft white coating, a clear bulb had no coating, and an inside frost bulb had either a very thin soft white coating or acid etching. This was the case for years with incandescents and halogens.

Many soft white fluorescent tubes were called “warm white” rather than soft. It was warm white, cool white, daylight for most brands. But suddenly, soft white now has nothing to do with the bulbs finish. Most 2700K clear LEDs are still called soft white.

What do you think about this?

In most of the streetlight retrofits I've seen, the Cap and Ignitor are removed, because just cutting the wires and undoing a nut is all it requires, but the ballast is left (with cut wires). I believe this is because the nuts holding it on are generally much harder to access, at least in the reftofitted fixtures I have.

@RRK
I wonder if they ever experimented with ceramics for these instead of quartz

Yep, adding some halides (CaI2 or NaI) to correct that ugly greenish tint immediately brings this creation into realm of metal halide lamps, arctube corrosion will straight away chop off 2/3 of that hyped 60K hours lifetime. Right?

As one internet meme said "Overcomplicated solutions for non-existing problems"

...And moron courts sided with the radio, completely ignoring what the band primary allocation was in the first place.

That's not actually true, they sided with the lamp manufacturers. From Wikipedia: "In May 2003, the FCC terminated the proceeding that would have defined out-of-band emission limits for radio-frequency lights operating at 2.45 GHz, saying the record of the proceeding had become outdated and Fusion Lighting had stopped working on such lamps.[9] The order concluded:

We therefore decline to provide the requested relief from the Satellite Radio Licensees to prohibit operation of all RF lights in the 2.45 GHz band, as we find that the requested prohibition is overarching and is not warranted based on the circumstances. If there is evidence that any entity will seek to operate RF lights in the 2.45 GHz band and cause harmful interference to satellite radio receivers as a consequence, and our existing limits prove inadequate, we will at that time take appropriate action."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamp#Electromagnetic_interference

It varies depending on the light type. LED HID retrofits usually need bypassing, but ballast compatible lamps exist. In fact, Home depot sells an LED filament lamp that runs straight off an H39 ballast for yard blasters. Bypass lamps are better IMO because of less failure points and components wasting energy. Same goes with fluorescent, although ballast compatible fluorescents are fine from my experience.

Most cases I've seen for HID fixtures, the ballast is left in place and simply bypassed electrically. One example is with this Spartan branded floodlight that came off a Deli during an exterior remodel and LED changeover. The floodlight was originally 250 MH, but had an LED Corncob lamp made by Light Efficient Design( which unsurprisingly was not as bright). Much to my benefit, the 250w metal halide ballast was still in there and functional, I just had to do some rewiring.

With fluorescent, I've retrofitted one of my basement recessed 4X F40T12 fluorescent fixtures with Feit ballast compatible LED tubes because I was fed up with the temperamental Rapid start ballasts. Most plug and play LED retrofit tubes are electronic ballast only, but these Feit lamps are compatible with magnetic (haven't tried with preheat yet)I got them from Home depot.

Idk if this is really off topic but whatever.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the only thing inside of "normal" glass that makes it block UV is trace iron impurities. I believe those iron impurities are also what gives many glass products their distinctive teal-green tint if you look closely. Therefore (again if I am thinking correctly), covering a harmful UV lamp with glass that looks teal will provide UV shielding while covering it with glass that looks more bright and clear has a risk of not sufficiently shielding against UV.

Lots of people here use drinking glasses as shields against smaller UVC lamps like the quartz cold cathode ones and the smaller hot cathode ones like the G4S11 and GTL3. But not all drinking glasses have higher iron content, many of by (some fairly thick) glasses at home have no visible teal coloration at all, meaning they might not provide protection.

Has anyone ever encountered this?