Personally, I would make peace with the realization that as long as you're constrained in speaker placement by the logistics of furniture and/or interior design, you will only be experiencing a small fraction of what they can really do. Sound staging, coherence, and tonality will never get close to what they capable of stuffed in a corner with a hulking piece of furniture in between. Accept it. Make peace with it. Get on with your life. Likewise, mucking about with moving inches from an acoustically untenable starting point, draping stuff with blankets, or other contortions are really only bandaids to make yourself feel better, not real solutions. Play away, by all means, but I suspect you'll not find huge differences.
I, however, like you it seems, have also made peace with the fact that sharing space well with your chosen companion is WAY more important than taking a stand on acoustic purity.
Here's what I would suggest. One day when She is not around and you have the place to yourself, pull the speakers several feet into the room and spend a couple hours moving them around. Pretend there's nothing else in the space, and dial them in purely by sound. First, it's a blast. There are a bunch of primers on the interwebs that will help identify all the various metrics to listen for, and what sorts of adjustments will best address them, but it really is a journey of trial and error. Helps if you've got a friend to assist (and immeasurably helpful if said friend happens to be an acoustic engineer, what can I say, I got really lucky with that one). Second, if things go as planed, should clarify a couple of issues in your thinking. Like, perhaps, dicking about with half measures has a role, but a limited one...? Third, unless you really give yourself a shot to learn what the speakers are capable of -- and you won't as long as you have'em stuffed in corners -- making small adjustments will kinda be like playing darts in the dark: tough to see what your aiming for, but what does it really matter because you can't see to know if you've hit it anyway? Anyway, give yourself a day to pretend nothing but the sound matters (knowing it's just make believe), and it could (should) be hugely enlightening. Then put it all back.
Finally, if this little experiment goes as planned, you can then think about devising a means of recreating it easily, unobtrusively, and in a means that works for everyone. I have my speakers on granite slabs, slabs on the "magic coaster" furniture sliders, and Stillpoints footers between the speaker and the granite. They live in the WAF-approved positions, easily come out to play when called for, and then go back where they came from in a matter of seconds. (I've got the current version of the ideal position marked off under the rug with blue painter's tape. But it remains a work in progress.).
All may sound like a pain in the ass, but I lived with speakers in the design-approved position for a well over a decade, as if it were a mental prison that I never permitted myself to think outside of. Giving myself permission to move them out into the room and let sound be the only guide was the single most enlightening (and sonically rewarding) moment in years and years of obsessing over this stuff. Think you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl. Best of luck.
