Ever landed a Lighthouse not quite centrally, and there's what seems sometimes like a half a second's worth of '...' before the base cup kind of 'clicks' into position? Maybe it's just me.
Thinking about active balance tricks, I suppose you've defined it quite well - you're not 'reaching' a balance position as with Lighthouse and Lunar (and even Stilts to some degree) so much as constantly 'maintaining' one when it comes to active. I've seen a few tricks like this on the net that have pretty much blown me away; spike-wise tama balances executed better than I can balance the tama on one finger with the spike, and obviously those Norcross 'Laquered Stilts' which are nothing short of maddeningly skilful.
I do think the case of 'transitional active balance' tricks (my God does that sound un-cool) has to be mentioned as well: I've watched Alex Ruisch switch from Lunar to Inverse Lunar while maintaining total contact, and I have seen someone (I think it might have been a very talented Swiss kendama player) pulling off Centrifugal Lighthouses (sounds like an early seventies prog band that never made it), similarly blowing the whole concept of rotation in kendama well out of the water. Something about these tricks especially captivates me in the way, as a quite unspectacular but obsessive juggler, watching Teku's endlessly inventive multi-ball contact juggling (
www.juggling.tv) kind of tears the 'sport' a new paradigm, to be oddly vulgar about it.
I'm off to thread my kendama with an extra long string, throw the ken in the air, put one foot on the tama and climb out of sight into the desert sky.