Last question first: no, low-voltage lights are not especially efficient. The lowered voltage is traded for increased amperage to achieve the same wattage, which is the real measure of power consumption.

That said, "easy on the eyes" generally means indirect lighting; you don't want to see the bulb, you don't want there to be extremely bright spots anywhere in your field of vision. Achieving that means that you use fixtures that bounce the light off of room surfaces, such as cove lighting illuminating the ceiling, or track or other aimable lighting pointed at the walls, artwork, etc. Depending on what your walls and ceiling are made of or what color they're painted, they will absorb some amount of the light rather than reflecting it back out into the room, so you need to generate enough light that the amount bounced out into the room is sufficient. Fortunately the living room probably doesn't need extremely bright ambient light.

There aren't a lot of good alternatives to fluorescent for doing this efficiently. Fortunately fluorescents have come a long way, and don't deserve the bad rap they get from people who developed prejudices based on older technology. Older fluorescents used magnetic ballasts that cycled on a relatively low frequency, causing flicker that many people could see and found uncomfortable. Most newer fluorescent fixtures have electronic ballasts which cycle at a much higher frequency so the flicker, while technically still there, is so fast that almost nobody can see it. The other reason fluorescents get a bad rap is that older bulbs, and the cheaper bulbs sold today, have really lousy color resolution, making it hard to tell one color from another, which also makes your eyes have to work harder. There are now much better bulbs available, the best of them coming very close to the quality of incandescent sources. They're also available in a wide range of color temperatures, to suit many tastes.

There are two significant things fluorescents still don't do well. Very few of them can be dimmed economically, and they are by nature diffuse so they can't be focussed into a tight spotlight-like beam the way incandescents can.

My suggestion would be to look for ways to use fluorescents for indirect ambient lighting, and supplement that with some table lamps and/or small halogen spotlights (recessed, track, etc.) for reading and accent lighting.

That's the background theory. I'm not, unfortunately, all that well-versed in particular fixture choices.

very helpful post! thank you!