Castlenock, that sounds good - if you can get your hands on one for naught and have some time at your disposal to get to know it, then why not? All just a matter of experience, no magic involved… 
To be honest, I didn’t quite follow the argument or rather which is better when. It very much seems to me that Jon shot the images already knowing he has a scan to back it all up. From my experience it should have been possible to get the same results using photogrammetry only.
What I didn’t get is about the glass or reflective surfaces, because I thought that in those cases both methods are equally flawed. If there’s clean glass, the laser will got right through and if it’s a reflective surface, it won’t work either. Same for photogrammetry but for different reasons, only that with reflective surfaces, photogrammetry might at least get some rought outline of the geometry, if there is enough detail on the surface (like scratches) so that it can latch on to something.