Yes it is bargain basement science, for sure!
Was purchasing a few at a time, at the local Dollar Tree Store, buck twenty-five each. Eventually, I bought two flats, each has 64 little garden lights.
When the LED is clipped off then you can simply plug the two output leads directly into a small solderless proto board, and do whatever you want with the signal, like try a short little string of decorative lights, as sold in many toy stores or variety stores. Lately I've favored covering the white-blue LED with half of a colored toy egg...scotch taped. These things aren't made for rainy outside conditions.
As a circuit analogy, consider a water bucket, filled up and dumped each cycle. So that way I've figured that the 'dump' phase isn't directly related to the 'fill' action, so (by analogy) aside from the fact that the battery is in series, with the coil and collapsing field, the 'dumping' action is separate, so a series resistor shouldn't affect battery drain, if you ignore the battery series contribution (just for a minute here).
It might be, maybe 50/50 so that a series LED resistor would affect battery drain, in proportion.
Yeah, and reading some other materials that have LC resonant action was difficult, although I grasp the basics of LC resonance.
I saw what you wrote, about possibly including a limiting resistor, like maybe 100 ohms, just for the inrush case. Also have considered using a slightly larger solar panel, larger than the 3 cm square. Putting another solar light panel in parallel gives more charging current, in daytime...(I think, lol)...
I'm doing what I term to be 'backyard science', using primitive tools, a multimeter etc.
But I'm lucky in that a roommate has all the Oscilloscope and other regular bench stuff, when needed.
(I do the lawn maintainence, also....as per the movie; Caddyshack)
Yes, I'm having a good time, out back, except this year crazy rainy.