Another thought on smaller room speakers. Let’s set the high bar. Cost no object smaller room speakers. Id offer these two: The Steheim Two.Five at $23,500 per pair and the Josep Audio Perspective 2 Graphene at $16,999 per pair. Oth are specifi6designed for smaller rooms, both are compact floor standers whose foot print is no bigger than a mini-monitor on a stand, and most interesting, both are 2.5 way designs - 2 smaller woofers run in parallel, rolling off the lower woofer early, at around the baffle step frequency. The smaller drivers also can be crossed over higher before off -axis beaming is an issue, and tweeters don't have to cross over so low as to compromise their power handling.l The advantages are extended bass and greater woofer area (for bass ’slam’) in a small cabinet, without compromising the midrange coherency, a simpler overall design and simpler crossover compared to a 3-way, which means less crossover insertion loss, fewer phase anomalies and greater ’livliness’ than can be achieved in a compact 3-way.
Both the example speakers given are way above your (and most peoples!) price range, but using those design characteristics might give you some good clues of what to be looking for. For any given system, the first 90% of possible performance is achievable for 10% of the cost of the last 10% of performance.