Thanks for all the responses. Sean, I think I will contact Clayton for his expertise and opinions on series crossovers. I will probably also get in touch with Bud Fried. Herman, I will check out Gizmo's ideas. I have considered horns, but have never really fell in love with them. I do have a pair of horn speakers in my living room that my father built in the mid 1960's. They are exactly as you suggested. The sound of them is pretty good. Perhaps, I will give higher quality horns more consideration.
I am not at all interested in a 5 channel HT setup, and expressed these feelings explicitly to my girlfriend. She has no problem with this, and basically just wants to have a nice looking setup in the family room. One where we can watch tv and she can sing karaoke. Whether my woodworking skills are up to the challenge(to make something "attractive") is the question. Her reasons for wanting a good amplifier/speaker arrangement are completely to appease her boyfriend, who happens to be waaaayyy too serious about audio.
As far as the excellent speaker questions that were raised, here are my rapid fire answers(sorry for my lack of clarity in the initial statements)... I was stating that the midranges(or mid/woofers) be run flat out(no caps, coils, or resistors), and wired in series in an overall parallel crossover network. Wiring the entire loudspeaker in series would preclude me from keeping components out of the path of the midrange drivers. Rgreene2, Triangle(glad you mentioned them) is one of the speakers(along with Eggleston and personal experience) which have proven to me the benefits of running the midrange or midwoofer with no crossover components in the circuit. In my parallel crossover approach, the tweeter would have a film and foil capacitor wired on its positive leg, and a resistor(if needed). As far as woofers(in the strict sense of the word) go, I am still undecided. They suck a good deal of current. I may just build these speakers with nothing larger than 6.5" drivers. If I later decided that I really needed to have that last octave, I could go with a pair of subwoofers.
Still have a lot of thinking to do... Things like do I use a REALLY dead cabinet, or more loosely damped(that everything old is new again thing)? I'll decide that after I figure out the crossover, but have always felt a dead cabinet was the way to go. Double thick walls(featuring MDF and plywood), with a layer of something between them(Swedak, viscoelastic, or other polymer), corner braced internally, and BlackHole 5 on the inside walls.