I agree you should put your dividend payers in a non-taxable account - ideally a pre-tax IRA like a traditional or rollover IRA at your brokerage.
The bad news is that dividend-paying stocks generally stink. They are paying dividends because they can identify no good prospects for reinvestment, growth, efficiency investments, entering new lines of business, etc. This is basically to say they are a declining company. Additionally, there is some political reason causing the board of directors to prefer being double-taxed on dividends instead of pursuing the much more tax-efficient route of stock buybacks. Some companies are jacking up their leverage and paying usurious interest rates on their shaky junk debt, all while paying a dividend. In these cases, the owners are looting the company and trying to get cash out of it before bankruptcy. This is why a search by dividend payers will uncover a lot of companies where you don't want to be invested. The term is "dividend trap".
There are two exceptions: REITs and MLPs are not double-taxed on dividends, but in return have to pay out the vast majority of their cash flow as dividends. These can be efficient companies that will last for decades, but do your DD first. I would not want to own retail or office real estate right now, and a lot of these firms are not earning as much as they're paying in dividends (so it's return of capital, not on capital).
Overall there's no reason to prefer dividend paying companies over companies that do stock buybacks or actually grow. Put your growers or index funds in your taxable accounts and your REITs, MLPs, preferred stock, and so on in tax-advantaged accounts at your brokerage. Just don't buy a "dividend fund" or the highest yielding stocks on the Yahoo screener, because that has never gone well!