I'm thinking of a lighting setup for my kitchen, and possibly permanent outdoor lighting for holidays if I can make it discrete enough. I want to start small, and work on the kitchen, having led strips for above the cabinets, below the cabinets, and possibly the baseboard, to where I can adjust lighting, more make patterns with them of my choosing... it wouldn't be anything SUPER complex, but I would like to have the ability for example to have green and red lights in a chain, and chase each other at a certain speed for xmas or something. Would like wireless access, something that can control multiple zones.. a mix of these features basically...
Many of the locations you're talking about putting led strip lights you might not see the individual LEDs, so there may not be that much benefit to the addressable ones. Although if you want to be able to create color sequences and not just one color or another you'd need addressable leds. Find pics/videos of other people's installs and learn from their mistakes
Under cabinet, above cabinet, and toe kick is likely to be a bit over the top. You (or your wife) may not like the way it looks. Start with under cabinet since it's the most practical / useful and expand from there. RGBW gives you nicer white/off white/pastel colors and you may like it better.
I was suggesting you start building a bit of a home automation system because it's nicer to control stuff like this from an integrated platform and you can do useful things like use your LED strip light to notify you of random things around the house. You may also want to stick something like this on the wall in the kitchen to control the under cabinet lights:
Wireless Z-Wave wall switch
or get a zwave motion sensor and automatically turn the leds on when you walk into the kitchen at night. you get the idea, but you don't want to always pull out your phone or hunt for the ir remote to control these lights. Z-wave is a mesh network so as you build it works better
Bottom line: you can make them a lot more useful than what most ir/rf/wifi controllers you see are capable of with some planning.
@nayr runs domoticz on a cubox iirc (still an arm board of some kind if it's something else):
nayr's home automation build out... but you have more that enough horsepower left on your
blueiris machine to run it (though you'd need to keep your zwave adapter out of your enclosed rack) and accept occasional downtime for windows updates. domoticz is probably the best open source automation software out there currently. If you wanted something simpler you could consider vera or homeseer.