I couldn't tell you the comparison with EL wire as I have never played around with it. With this option you could go a 45W LED light engine which would in theory make the tubing much brighter - you would hope.
Here is a link for the TRON LE on youtube showing the effect of fibre optic tubing, though this one has a programmable board that times various colours and effects.
http://youtu.be/RNJg3wJboTAToday I made a bush out of aluminium with 4 x 6mm holes as close as possible - this way I can feed two cut lengths of fibre optic tubing with each end going in to give it the best hope of being bright. In addition it keeps the end going in as straight as possible making sure the light enters it straight as it is surprising how much the intensity drops if you manually move it into the eye of the light engine.
This aluminium bush just slides into the cable gland supplied with the light engine and tighten up on to the bush not the cable.
Check out the bush below, apologies for the photo quality as the flash was lighting up the aluminium too much so had to go without on the 2 of the 3 photos.
