Cool cool, thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, the proximity to the wall is the main reason I started looking askance at the tower design, even with changing to front ports (which a recent thread demonstrated with a gloss black cabinet -- I liked it!)
Looks like it's probably going to make my life easiest if I do smaller sealed boxes for these, a la X-CS. And then some day, if I magically get a lot more space to play with, I can reuse the components to make towers (thanks for that idea, Hobbs!). I ran my old speakers without a subwoofer for many, many years. It worked out just fine. I do plan to build a subwoofer in the future, for sure.
More questions, though (which I found answers to, maybe):
When we say "distance from the wall", what's the other endpoint of the measurement? The edge of the front baffle? Nearest corner/edge of the speaker cabinet?
With speakers that are 1.5' deep, that's like half the distance recommended to space out from the front wall, right? Does that mean they actually extend 4.5' into the room? -- Well, with a rear port, that's probably not a bad idea...
I guess it should be measured from the virtual center of where the sound is originating in the speaker itself, so on these MTM arrangements, the tweeter.
Makes sense to me, but I don't know if it's reasonable or correct.