"My thought is that you need to listen in the near field. You mitigate many of the challenges and sacrifice very little. It is easy to set up, imaging can be stunning and the level of impact and immediacy is thrilling."
Excellent suggestion!
The setup I have in mind is a borderline nearfield setup, as distance from ears to speakers would probably be between four and five feet. And it might sound better if you scoot speakers and listening seat a little bit closer to one another.
But I'd still recommend the extreme toe-in configuration, to push those first sidewall reflections as far back in time as possible.
And there are other benefits to this unorthodox geometry: When a reflection comes from the same side as the first-arrival sound, it has a tendency to be perceived as coloration. But when the reflection comes from the other side, so that it arrives at the opposite ear first, then it is perceived as ambience and tends to enhance the timbre (assuming it is spectrally correct).
And one final potential benefit: A wider sweet spot. The ear-brain system localizes sound by two mechanisms: Arrival time, and intensity. By criss-crossing the speaker axes, we get something unusual for a listener off to one side of the centerline: The near speaker (obviously) "wins" arrival time, but the far speaker "wins" intensity! This is because the off-center listener is well off-axis of the near speaker, but on-axis (or very nearly so) of the far speaker. So we still get a decent soundstage even when listening from off to the side. The secret is, the near speaker's output must fall off rapidly and smoothly as we move off-axis. A 90-degree-wide pattern (-6 dB at the edges) works well for this. And the uniformity of the radiation pattern means that the tonal balance is good throughout the listening area.
Duke