By the way, in my search, I came across this chip {TLC5970}
That's a nice chip, new one on me. It seems to be a combination of a buck converter to drop the bulk of the supply voltage at high efficiency and three linear current sinks to fine-tune each RGB channel current. Best of both worlds, plus the dot correction and (greyscale) level features, and expandable along a chain to other devices.
If you're concerned about BOM cost differences in cents, then I guess you're intending to build a lot of these, will be laying out a PCB and maybe reflow soldering screen pasted boards. If that's the case, then I'd have no worries about the HTSSOP package. But I agree with Chagrin,wouldn't want to hand solder one.