Mechs can be small and durable - and give you what you want (or more) at the press of a button.
There is this misconception that mechs are unsafe and regulated mods are safe, regardless - and requires no knowledge to use safely. Stick a battery of the exploding volatile variety in regulated mod and stress it too hard - it will still go haywire. An ICR battery with a 2-4 amp limit does not care if it's in a mechanical mod or a regulated one if you try to pull a few dozen watts out of it.
Battery safety is first and foremost about which battery you use - secondly about how you use it. The sum of it is that you have to use the right battery the right way.
If you vape safely - and get your desired vape at the press of a button... does it really matter how the electrons got to the coil?
All very good points, of course.
But as more and more of the regulated mods have built-in batteries (and frankly, I prefer the ones that do - less cost, less hassle), picking the wrong battery is just not an issue.
As for regulated being safer in general - I was really talking about things like reverse battery protection, and more importantly, short protection.
Example: I've had a couple of shorted coils on my iStick 50W. My own fault. I have been rebuilding coil heads for tanks, in particular the heads that come with the Smok VCT and GCT tanks, which are nice for rebuilding because it's fairly easy and they have 2 x 3mm juice intakes (great for wicking and re-wicking.)
But I got too fancy - I was trying to put in twisted wire builds, and although I was very careful, the coils were just a little too large to reliably sit inside the head, and twice I had the coil move as I was re-wicking it, ending up touching coil head metal without me realising.
Or to be precise, it's happened far more than that, but most of the time I noticed the dramatic drop in ohms and didn't fire it. Twice, I did not notice and fired it.
On my regulated mod, the result was that it said "Protection" and stopped firing. And one of the times it also shut down on me, appearing to be dead, which would have worried me greatly if I hadn't already seen pbusardo's review where he had the same thing, and reported that it reboots as soon as you plug in a USB cable (so it's kind of a safety shutdown.)
But in neither case was any damage done (well, not to the mod - the rubber gromit on the coil got slightly burnt during the <0.1 second it was firing.)
With a mech mod, I'd at the very least have killed the battery I think? Actually I don't know for sure what would happen on a mech mod? But I'm pretty sure it'd be bad!
Of course, one should work to the specs of the tools one has - if I had a mech mod, I would not have dreamed of attempting potentially risky, tight-fitting coil head rebuilds. I'd build in a much larger margin of safety in all building.
But still, that regulated protection seems to me to count for quite a bit. And shorts can happen for many reasons. In this case it was my own doing, but there's any number of conceivable scenarios where a short could occur without the user knowing or causing it.
So I do maintain that regulated provides a significant level of protection that's very worthwhile - though of course I realise even regulated mods can be pushed too far and can fail. I no longer attempt those larger coil head rebuilds at all.
To be fair I think it's mostly been civil, though - perhaps one exchange not included.
