Very true. And I steered away from squares due to the "swastika effect". Also because the information is slightly more dense with a system based on triangles - 6 bits at a given vertex versus 4 bits.
I agree that triangles look a lot better than squares (to the point that the "swastika effect" is indeed a problem, even though the drawings are generated by a human, and not randomly.) However, they are also very hard to draw properly.
To recover the QR code decentralization, have you tried to encode data inside your triangular grid? You would loose the "drawable" property (due to the size), but the result would still look more interesting than the pixel junk of QR codes (and you could enforce "connectivity" for aesthetic and error correction.)