If you're looking to increase component life you definitely don't want to forgo the backplane; heatsinking is absolutely critical for high brightness LED longev

If you're looking to increase component life you definitely don't want to forgo the backplane; heatsinking is absolutely critical for high brightness LED longevity. There is too much heat being put out by that tiny chip for convective cooling to be of any use without spreading it out first. The problem is, unless they are specifically marketed as such, those LED strips usually do not have any thermal management, meaning that heat is not being transferred through the strip board into your backplane. Unless you're well-versed in PCB thermal management design, I wouldn't attempt designing your own LED boards - get prefab units like those sold by https://www.ledsupply.com/ https://www.ledsupply.com/ , which you can screw directly onto a heatsink. And if you really do want to design a custom board, the emitters LEDSupply packages are a good place to start--there are only a handful of manufacturers for high-quality high-brightness diodes and they pretty much stock them all. You can find Cree XLamp LEDs for example at any of the major component retailers.