Not sure why your against self contained battery powered lights. With LED's you would only have to recharge once a week and even then, according to your useage, they would be no where near going dead. Cateye makes a couple nice bright LED lights, one is the Cateye Single Shot ($79 at Amazon) which uses a eternal battery and the brightest at this price, and the other is the Cateye HL-EL530 ($45 at REI) which uses 4 AA's which you could use rechargeables for it. If you want something really bright but don't want an external battery but don't mind spending a bit more, the Cygolite ExpiliOn 250 is very bright but cost around $112 on sale at REI right now. The Cygolite uses a self contained rechargeable battery that is user replaceable with a new battery from Cygolite.

Here is a web site that shows the beams of all the above lights for comparison, plus beams of quite a few others: http://www.modernbike.com/light-comp...singleshotplus