Tone mapping has been my go-to scene finish since iClone 5.  Used properly, it gives images a lot of power; it's iClone's quick and dirty way to do in a few seconds what it would take you a few minutes, or more, to do in photoshop or your NLE, if you had to, namely - adjust levels and color saturation. Actually, I have yet to really duplicate the effect of  iClone's Tone Map.  It's pretty special in that regard as it gives images a unique flavor.

I'll give you an example.  Here's an unprocessed image in iClone 7:



GI is on, and I've got several light sources, including a directional light.  And you can see I'm pushing the specularity of the skin texture to give me an interesting effect.
Now, here's the same shot with Tone Mapping:



The blacks get deeper.  The colors pop.  This gives the scene a lot of punch and, for me, makes it more compelling.
LUTS, by contrast, put a filter over everything - which is fine.  LUTS have many uses, obviously.  But I have yet to come up on a use-case where I want a LUT instead of the Tone Map.
Here's the same shot with LUT applied... I created this LUT starting with a night-time effect, which I then customized in Photoshop to try to duplicate the look of the Tone Map:



It's not bad.  I was able to match the color and darkness of the tone map, but you can see it changed the color of my city lights, and I still don't get the punch of all the highlight colors in the scene.  Note, the LUT turned my city background lights purple.
So, you say, "so what?"  Pick one or the other, and don't worry about it.  Well, there's one small snag...
If you want to do Panorama 360, and you use Tone Mapping, you get seams in your spherical image:



So, if you're working on a project  (for example, a mix of still images, videos, gifs, and 360s) and you want to create a consistent look and feel you have to CHOOSE between Tone Mapping and LUTS... a difficult choice!  Obviously, I would prefer not to have to make this choice!  One possibility that might cure this issue is to add a BLENDING MODE feature to the LUT Adjust Color Panel.

Just my two cents.

Cheers!  

Still prefer iClone's 7 Tone Maper to the Luts  but your right a good idea would be a blend option

I thought Tone Mapper and LUTS had different applications?

EDIT: Sorry, that's what you said already...

---