As I mentioned in the discussion thread for the L&L article, I think there's room in between the two ideas for different and distinct identities for the various types of magical doodads. In general, I dislike the 50-charge wand of repeatedly casting the same spell over and over again, but I'm also not interested in the mathematical implications of the +4 wand of every type of spell casting at once. (For equality's sake, I should point I also don't want +4 swords.)
So, as I see it we have four types of spell doodads. Potions, scrolls, wands and staves. There are rods too, but they're trickier and more varied, so I shall leave them aside for now.
Potions - I'd like to keep these as they were in 3.X and previous editions. Weaker magic, limited spell choice, fragile and clumsy to use. Best for emergencies.
Scrolls - I see two potential uses for these, which I think would work well together. One is the idea that other people have put forward (and I'm going to steal for this post) that a scroll allows you to cast whatever spell is inscribed upon it as a ritual, slower casting time, but no additional resource required. Yeah, the wizard might have a scroll of 'knock', but if the party has a thief, the lock will be picked before you get done casting from the scroll. So it's a sort of last ditch backup. But it does mean that a scroll of fireball is nigh useless in combat. So perhaps use two is more like the idea presented in the L&L article. Using the same casting time/ritual restriction as use one, you can swap a prepared spell for the scroll, basically a mid-day revision of your prepared spell list. Then you can cast it normally.
Wands - These are traditionally tied to a single spell. Wand of fireball/cure light wounds/magic missile. So, combined with the idea that spells only scale in higher level slots, perhaps these function somewhere in between container and implement, and enhance (scale) their namesake spell, but only that spell. They're tied to a specific spell, but act more like a boost than a battery, and are limited by the wizard's slots and prepared list.
Staves - These are usually more generally flavored. Staff of Fire/Earth/Force. I think these would work nicely as the on-the-fly spell exchange described for scrolls in the article. You supply the magical "oomph" in the form of a different prepared spell, and the staff transforms it into one of its signature spells. Again, not a container, but slightly more interesting (I feel) than just increasing all spells across the board.
Obviously all these ideas would need tweaking to work with non-wizards (namely sorcerers and "use magic device" type users), but I think it could be an interesting framework to start from.
