>What I don't understand is why modern houses aren't set up with a central, high quality "driver" with adequate cooling to convert AC to a steady DC current
This comes up fairly often here (because, after all, it isn't a hardware design forum), and the answer every time is - I^2 x R is a bitch. Losses increase with the square of current, instead of directly (as in the case of voltage). This is why it's significnatly more efficient to run power lines at high voltage, not high current. Running lighting circuits at LED voltage would require surprisingly thick cables to avoid losing most of the power in the cable runs.
On the other hand, it might make sense to create a 48v LVDC circuit, and regulate down from that at the point of load. This would avoid all of the issues with designing every single little LED bulb to handle 110v AC (or here, 240v AC), and the inevitable failure of the highly-stressed components.