Tone Mapping in a physically based rendering ray tracer
That's just how the Reinhard operator works. If the scene has very high dynamic range important detail may be lost near the high luminance region as you found since both will map near 0.99. Reinhard is a form of global operator. There are other types of algorithms using local operators which tonemap the pixel based on the intensity of the underlying neighborhood like a 3x3 or 5x5 region. 

I'd recommend reading HDR Imaging Acquisition, Display and Image Based Lighting by Erik Reinhard. It's a very good book and explains much of the concepts.