If you want more light, the best route is to add auxiliary driving lights and maybe some fog lights (only use in bad weather, I can't understand why people drive around with these things on all the time!)
As for spending big dollars on shorter life primary bulbs, I can't justify it anymore. Seems that the "regular" version sold by the big names (GE and Sylvania seem top be the most popular) for around $7.50 each are very close to the performance of the fancy bulbs costing $15 or more per each. And in my experience, all of the fancy ones burn out with much greater frequency, further increasing the cost of operation. The amount you will save on buying the cheap bulbs through both lower purchase price and longer bulb life will quickly pay for a couple pairs of auxiliary driving lights.
A little food for thought:
If you drop the average bulb life to 1/3rd of OEM, then you can achieve about a 25% gain in output with the same wattage (not counting IR coated bulbs, totally different class there). Many of the "fancy" bulbs do this, and really are about 25% brighter when fresh out of the package. However, as it would turn out, when the filament runs at a higher temperature to achieve this increased efficiency, lumen maintenance gets worse in most cases. Which means that after a hundred hours or so, it may not be any brighter than the "cheap" bulbs. To make matters worse, running the filament at a higher temperature makes the filament more susceptible to premature failure, especially from vibration and shock loads which are going to b prevalent in a moving vehicle. I just skimmed through the 9 pages here in this thread, and I think one could argue that the point I am making about bulb life has been proven right here in this thread, lots of reports of fancy Halk-StarVisionX-UltrasupermEGA-G9 bulbs failing after 3 months.
It takes about a 30% difference in light output to "see" or "notice" in a non-side-by-side comparison. The human eye responds to illumination and perceives it in a logarithmic fashion. To notice "substantial" changes in illumination requires a large change, like double or more. (this is why I suggest just installing some auxiliary driving lights, you can have double the illumination when you are out away from traffic where you need it)
Here's an idea: Buy the cheap bulbs, but replace the wiring in the car that leads to the bulbs with 2 sizes heavier gauge. This will result in an output similar to the expensive bulbs with the same sacrifice of bulb life but you can pay less each time you replace them
(NOTE: this would cause the fancy bulbs to burn out EVEN FASTER than before!)
Eric