A look at why 99% of mass-market speakers are either a sealed or ported.
Engineering is about tradeoffs. Problems are usually multifaceted. Solutions must strike a balance beteen the various elements to maintain practicality. The largest obstacle is always cost. Many physicists are painfully unaware of this and will be much more forthcoming with solutions than the average engineer.
Horns get points for the higest efficiency. The horn acts as an acoustic transformer between the driver and the air. They are practical only at high frequencies, since in the bass range they have to be tens of feet long. Also with cheap high-power amplifiers, efficiency is not as important as it used to be. They are seen more in PA systems since efficiency IS a big deal there.
Transmission lines are notoriously difficult to design which snubs most of their development. They poorly model with current equations (bad equations) so are largely unpredictable. They are also physically bulky when lower frequencies must be reproduced. They can be also have problems with sub-resonance unloading.
Similar problems to transmission lines.
Electrostatic Speakers have vanishingly low distortion(overshoot,ringing,etc), because the diaphragm mass is so small. Transient response is excellent. Unfortunately, electrostats have extremely high directivity which makes them "shoot laser beams of sound" which can only play well to one listening position. They are also thin, tall, wide, have poor low-frequency response, and are charged at several thousand volts so represent a shock hazard. Most amplifiers have a tough time driving them due to their high capacitance. Backwave is easy to deal with using felt/cloth becuause they cannot produce frequencies low enough to run into issues with absorbing long waves.
Plasma Tweeters can have the lowest distortion of any other driver since they are modulating a luminous stream of ions which is lower mass than that of air itself. Transient response is fantastic. However they do generate ozone, UV, radio interference, and extremely hot arcs which can cause fire, as well as the potential for shocks.
Dipoles have excellent transient response but suffer from low efficiency. They also heavily unload the drivers below resonance so may need high-pass filters to not be damaged. The backwave can be problematic since most dipoles are low-frequency designs.