Mystic llama is closest to the answer. If you're trying to keep the overall noise down but the coverage even you need to think about it differently, almost like it's lighting.
Imagine if you had a huge spotlight in each corner and tried to light the room with them. Speakers accomplish the task the same way. People close to the speakers are miserable and people in the middle of the room are also miserable.
A larger amount of smaller speakers will maintain the coverage but keep the overall "energy expended in the room" low. It will sound better and it won't escape the room as easily. Nothing is going to sound amazing in that room but that's not what you're looking for anyway.
The pendants from above are "70 volt" speakers which do not require individual AC power but will need an amp somewhere in the room. Yes you daisy chain them. They do have a benefit in that you can have lots of them in the room, at quieter volumes. It is unlikely that they would be able to handle "wedding dancing" volume, however.
If you wanted to be clever and super elegant you could find a way to hang one (or a few) in each lighting fixture!
You could also mount a traditional trapezoidal speaker along the top of each wall angled down towards the floor 1/3 of the way into the room. You could buy "powered" speakers which will require AC to every speaker and also the signal wire. If you had 6 or 8 of them spread throughout the room they would do great and actually be quieter than a speaker in each corner destroying itself trying to cover the whole space. You could mount them horizontally along the top edge of the long wall so the coverage angle of each speaker is utilized most efficiently in the room and not throwing sound up into the ceiling or unnecessarily into the floor. Another alternative could be mounting them to the beams and you could paint them to match the beam color.
Last option is you could buy conventional unpowered speakers and wire them to a power amp somewhere in the room. Which is similar to what you just removed. Also a fine choice and very similar to the "70-volt" speakers but sounds better. Downside is slightly higher cost. It's also easy but you would need to be careful with the wiring as there are rules to "how many" speakers can be wired together to one amplifier. It's not difficult you just have to do some super easy math.
Oh yeah and increase your budget by a factor of 10, generally speaking.
