Pyros
<Silver Donator>
The NPCs won't necessarily be "happy enough" to offer pylons. I had the painter and the dye guy in the ice biome and neither would sell me a pylon, even though they were overall happy, but neither liked ice(didn't dislike either, they were at 90% costs so positive). I moved the dryad in and the painter then offered me the pylon. Once you have the pylon though you can move them back properly, so mostly you just make little houses where you want your pylons and check the wiki then move chars around(do it during the night since they relocate instantly there, just run like a screen away and they'll pop in the houses they're assigned to, can check minimap) and then put them back where you want.In regards to pylons, I heard some streamer say the key was use two NPCs to get all of the pylons (most?). You get two NPCs happy because they are near each other, and only each other, and then you move those two around to each biome and get all the pylons. Once you have a pylon, you need two NPCs near one to activate the pylon put they don't need to be happy themselves, so you plop down any NPC other than your "happy pair" and it activates. I haven't verified this myself, but if you don't care about best prices this might be an easier way to get the pylons down for quick transport.
I'd say the thing you probably want to do is make a ghetto for all your shitty NPC away from your base, and put the merchant and the nurse in your base. The merchant likes the nurse and likes forest and with only 2 people he also likes that, so you get a good amount of happiness(not the highest since he doesn't love anyone, have to redo it later but nurse+merchant is an early NPC couple you can get). This makes it so he buys your shit for more money. Not a huge deal but doesn't hurt.
On the luck mechanic it doesn't seem so bad, only relevant when you're actually farming item drops, in which case you just make one or two of the right torches around your farm spot. I guess if you're exploring and farming at the same time(hard mode dungeon for example) then you'll want to make a bunch of torches beforehand but that's not that common. Even using the wrong torch isn't THAT bad, it's just a 15% reduction in drop chance, which on most drops is going to be unnoticeable. You can just not use any torch too once you have enough natural light shit at which point you're never penalized pretty much.