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We all judge on different merits, so this is fine!
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I’m seeing the same colours when judging the image. Sigmoid in ‘per channel’ mode does something different, but I don’t like it at all. And messing with the ‘preserve hue’ slider introduces a colour which shouldn’t be there, in my opinion.
Toggling between the filmic one and the sigmoid one, the colour (hue) is not different (well, maybe if you start measuring). But just looking at it, specially from a meter extra away, I don’t see a problem between those two.
Now, yes, the wholep point I was saying, is that filmic handles the extreme highlights different. You see here in filmic there is a sort of ‘cut off’ point where it goes to white. Before that point, it tries to hold on to the colour that’s there for dear life. This causes the jump, and the fact it’s not judged ‘smooth’ by most (and I agree!).
But sigmoid makes it smooth by not being as saturated. Sigmoid just starts going to white smoother and earlier. That colour filmic is trying to hold on to, is there in the un-tone-mapped version. Filmic just messes up the transition.
Sigmoid wins the transition, but it does so by being less colourful / saturated. It loses colour-detail.
In cases where you can’t properly judge the ‘true’ colour anyway (like bright sun, or skin tone directly lit by bright sun), this is probably the more preferable method. (Also the reason why the ‘colorbalance rgb - natural skin’ preset desaturates the highlights quite a lot).
But imagine that you know which colour it was, like a bright blue sky. Then what sigmoid is doing is a shame, because it looses the colour.
If the amount of colour in the extreme highlights is of no concern, then filmic luminanceY (or ‘no’) but now even better sigmoid is probably the choice.
I’m looking at some snaps from my own, and yes, when directly hit with sunlight things can get messy. But to be honest, I don’t like sigmoid then at all. I just think skin with bright sun on it is always a mess. I try to use the tone-equalizer to, well, equalize the lighting of it. If that doesn’t work, I just often don’t use the shot. Maybe that’s why I never thought about differences in that.
So, I’m learning use cases here 
. Can you guys have a crack at this file? I’ll start a play-raw thread for it to not pollute or hijack this thread for a single photo. But I am interested in what filmic / sigmoid uses are here.
Play raw here: Handling shade + direct sunlight with skin-tones, filmic / sigmoid preference?