I finally released all my photos from iPhoto purgatory & handle them with lightroom. Full quality & I can throw it on an external without having to hunt around for it.
Basically - you have to go into iPhoto, find a bunch of hidden folders that contain the original photos and then copy them out & let lightroom import / organize them according to any rules you set.
Pretty simple - longest part was copying all the files since I had a decent number (200GB) of photos.
