For bloom: your bang on that 2700k 90cri rocks flower. But cobs have a thermal problem: your putting a lot of watts into a small chip that need big heatsinks.
Strips: if by penetration you mean how fast light will decrease as you increase distance from the light source; strips are actually better for this, i know its counter intuitive but cobs are more like point sources, suffer more from the inverse square law. I was surprised to see it myself irl. Also, its harderr to get hanging height right mixing cobs with strips. But they can be really neat for corners as strips tend to lack light around there.
GLA has a very nice spectrum and good specs, adding some uv to the mix. Or_gro, a forumer who left, did a few side by sides, maxed out, and the general agreement was that the GLA boards won over various boards.
Theres some strips at cutter electronics that seem to copy the spectrum, could be another good option. The only thing is that this spectrum might not be completely vegg friendly, especially if you dont like stretch. You could add on a few coldwhite strips on a second driver to have flexibility.
For cobs: bridgelux vero29, gen 8, is being released now. 2700k 90 cri is probably not the first spectrum to hit digikey. Luminous have good performance aswell, but i think youve been looking at smaller 18mm cobs. No bueno, the bigger the better. For more info on luminous cobs id checl with
@CobKits he has them.
Side point: there is a lot of love for cobs from growers, timber growlights made some board lights but went back to cobs cause of popular demand. But from a spec and ease of build its hard to see why. We tried high power cobs, 100w and didnt like theem.
