The array of lights trick is older school than area lights though: we used to have to do that before software had area lights.  Area lights have only been in Vue since Vue 6 so the odds are they haven't been through the optimization cycle in development many times.

I had to do architectural lighting calculations by hand on my degree so I found out the hard way that sometimes the approximate methods give a result that is often almost identical to the more accurate method but a lot quicker - in many cases when light sources are not close to an object the calculated values are identical for different ways of representing the same light.

As computers get more powerful the need to use these tricks to do stuff becomes less and less important - until you want to push things closer to the limits by doing very large renders or long animations.  Then it comes down to your patience and your deadlines.  Personally I'd prefer to use one of the tricks and get the render in less hours that will look so close to using an area light that took lots more hours.

A friend of mine teaches CG at degree level and every year five or six students are "purists" who use every advanced bit of the software they use and every year two of the purists fail the course because they don't submit on time because their render is still running a week after the deadline.  Another friend of mine is a model builder for the film industry who specialises in cityscape and urban shots.  Every year his company picks up half its work from bailing out films that had commissioned CG cityscapes from new and inexperienced CG company couldn't deliver because they made the models too detailed.

As to why he uses blue rather than grey to dim an area light I can guess but Chipp will give you the answer I'm sure...

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