Cantilever brakes and dual/single pull caliper brakes pull the same amount of cable. V-brakes OTH can't be used unless you a Travel Agent or something similar. Hope that helps. Good luck
As for the V brakes - I recently installed some Travel Agents on my commuter which has short pull brake levers like STI levers. They work great, much much better than w/o. W/o the TravelAgents the brakes sort of worked but were pretty dicey. I had to pull the lever pretty much down to the handlebar to get good braking, and then the brakes were very "grabby" and hard to modulate. With the TA's they feel like normal brakes. Pretty easy to install too. I bought the kind with cable adjusters built in because there were no cable adjusters between my brake levers and the brakes, so that helped too.