From an earlier thread, the initial discussion was about a linear design, so I don't think efficiency is an issue except for the local heating aspect.
As for home-brew designs from scratch, efficiency better than an off-the-shelf design can often be obtained because it is possible to tailor to the exact input-output requirements (eg wind your own transformer). Better than 95% should not be too hard with a buck converter because it involves only one switching transistor and an inductor. If isolation between input and output is not an issue, the switch could be low side (draw a regular buck upside-down) and get even better efficiency by using a lower RDSon transistor. So many choices, it's hard to know where to start.