Well the replacement Philips lasted significantly shorter with the heavy gauge relay harness. Purchased 12/2018 and burnt out earlier this week. (...) Overall poor return on investment
If you got close to a year-and-a-half lifetime out of the high-perf Philips bulbs fed by a fire hose (relay harness) and you're complaining about that, you really need to adjust your expectations to conform to reality.
They were VERY decent when new but lighting quality degraded significantly in the past year.
Interesting...how did you measure this?
tempted to try the Hella +50 or the Wagner Nightdefense
Both of those are a complete waste of money if what you're trying to get is a bulb that will give a real headlight performance benefit over a standard bulb.
I'd love to go with a higher wattage bulb
That would be a very bad idea for all kinds of reasons. Poor beam performance (see what high-watt bulbs do to beam focus
here). Also, your headlight reflectors -- the plastic substrate and the shiny material that makes them reflectors -- will perish. Also, the base contacts in an H13 bulb are undersized even for standard wattage, never mind for high wattage. Also there are no high-wattage H13 bulbs that are of good enough quality (filament placement, etc) to be worthy of serious consideration. Also you're in a pickup truck, so your headlamps are at a high mount height, which means you'll be throwing unsafe levels of glare all over the place (unless you lower the aim, then your seeing distance will be much too short...lose/lose).
It sounds like you're kind of splashing around, grabbing at random bulbs you think (based on _______?) will be better than the Philips. If you really have a hate for the Philips because you think their performance degraded over time, try
the GE product and at least grab at something decent.