Have you thought of a single door? I'm leaning that direction for the very reasons you mention. My ice & water were the first to go on my Amana. French doors also have the problem of having to open both doors to access the meat drawer. Everyone I know that uses the single door loves them. No water on the door, but water dispenser is right inside. FYI, my kids, when they were really little, made quite a mess with the ice/water on the door!

I have a LG CD FD (how's that for alphabet soup?) and so far have been very happy with it, although I learned (on this forum, after I bought it) that LG has a bad customer service reputation. I paid $1800 at Best Buy after watching sales for a few weeks. GE Profile, Maytag, and Jennaire were the other CD FDs available to me. I hated the SxSs available in the 1980s-1990s and am so glad that the FDs are now available. Mine has doors that can store a gallon of milk and room enough for a big pizza or two. The freezer space is decent.

We have 30''/18'' Therm columns. For us, the SZ vs Therm decision was driven by appearance--we wanted totally integrated units that would disappear between our wall cabinets. The large overhead grill in the SZ made them unworkable. You look at a "fully integrated" SZ, see the grill, and say "oh there's a SubZero." You look at our cabinets and unless you know where, you can't find the Therms. It's an affectation, but one what works well with our moderately contemporary kitchen. Otherwise, they perform well, albeit with some minor concerns to date about reliability, see my other posts on that topic.

My new and wider clearance is 11-1/2 inches and that is after turning the studs behind that wall to pick up a little space, replacing a standard freestanding fridge with a built-in and keeping the same footprint on the island, but probably easing it back a bit withing the toekick space. I don't know if I had 4" before the remodel and it hadn't been a big issue for us. Folks could wait a few seconds, someone can ease the door back or the person can go around the island. You really shouldn't be sitting with your fridge door open that much. We didn't open the aisle for people passing when the fridge door was open. We wanted the space larger to allow more clearance before the exterior door hit the cabinets behind it and wanted a generally wider aisle there since that is a side door under a covered parking area and the most used entrance into our house. Had nothing to do with walking past an open fridge -- something we still don't do much even with that being near the most used entrance. I would set your fridge up for the best use of your kitchen in terms of eating and cooking. If that is going to require you to be walking back and forth past an open fridge, I would rethink the layout, not the fridge choice.