As far as the “flicker” thing goes, the old old school CFLs used the house current in a kind of stone-age hookup. Yes, 60Hz will make you sick. Later, they used twice house current: 120Hz can be irritating too, depending on what else is in the room (periodicity).
But the new ones have super-high frequencies that most human eyes simply cannot detect. There are some unlucky souls who have problems, but most of the world cannot tell. Incandescents are something like 20% efficient.
I have a bunch of CFLs all over the place: modern units from Philips, GE, etc. They produce a warm yellowish light at about 80-90% efficiency.
Sometimes incandescents are necessary (ovens, fridges, dimming chandeliers, X-mas lights, high-traffic on-off settings, etc.), but they are the exceptions.
Yes, I still have small incandescents in our kitchen lamp on our dimmer switch. Our fridge and oven have incandescents.
I am not yet ready to pay what they are asking for CFLs that work on dimmer switch circuits. I may just not even get them and get the white diode lights instead when their prices come down.