Take pictures as you build them. We in the peanut gallery love to criticize the efforts of others
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I hear & understand you as I used to feel that way myself. I had used (since 1973) some JBL L100s with large 12" woofers. It turns out, their bass response was not as low as I thought, were exaggerated, not exactly boomy, but it led to a muddy sound in the upper bass.
This is called 'high Q' or 'resonant' bass, and is often used in less expensive designs to produce louder but less articulate sounding bass.
The tall skinny towers with smaller diameter woofers can (but not always) have bass that sounds cleaner and sometimes deeper than older designs from the 70s and 80s. It all comes down to physics. That was worked out in the early 1970s for sealed cabinet and ported cabinet designs. Those math formulas allow one to predict the bass sound without having to do trial and error in wood. When consumers started buying speakers with smaller cabinets, especially those with smaller footprints, the woofer makers started making smaller woofers, in the 5-7" diameter range, that could produce decent bass. Of course, it comes with a price. One of the main advantages of DIY speaker building is that you can choose low Q non-resonant cabinet dimensions.
Much later, in the last 10-20 years, the physics and math was also worked out for transmission line cabinets. TL bass, is in my opinion a better sounding way to reproduce bass in home speakers. Think of that unused space inside a TL speaker cabinet the same as you would a column of vibrating air inside the pipes of a pipe organ.
