You bring up great points! It's definitely a lot of information to take in (some of which is going over my head) but I really do appreciate your thorough response.

Is it possible that the adjustable white light you were referring to was this BTF COB light? It's rated with a CRI of 90+. Do you know if it will work with WLED? It'd be great if she could control both the RGB and the white strip from the same app.

Unfortunately, I don't think the controller I linked will work with the COB strip, so I'm not really sure what to do in that regard. I can't seem to find pre-build controllers that have both WB5/5in1 capability and also have WLED on them.