Newbie here: What's the brightest diy led?

Me and my buddy want to do our own holiday lights next year. We're having a hard tine finding the brightest led lights to use. What should I look for?

Also, a lot of the "professional" services are using the three diode pucks. What's the advantage to those, if any?

Finally, what my wife says she wants is a more traditional look like with the string lights rather than strip lights, and more like CO distance in between. When I look at Dr Zzzs (love the simplicity and even price point of PermaTrack) they're only 2" in between lights. Is it better to use a string with 9" spacing or to use the wled software to control that?

Thanks in advance, I'm new, so I have lots of questions...