Hi Brant,

I have been using Lightroom for a few years now and I think it's absolutely great.
I personally love the library mode where you can easily access and manage all your photos and do very basic things.
And when you want to do more specific edits on a photo you go into the developer mode, which sounds like a big deal, but it's just clicking a button
I do pretty much everything in Lightroom exept for HDR and very demanding stuff. That's where I use CS5.
But since you have used DPP I'm pretty sure you'll love Lightroom. I had to switch back to DPP a few times and each time it felt as a pain in the butt
I would suggest downloading the trial and see if you like it.
As far as DXO concerns. I have no experience nor knowledge about it so I can't tell you anything about it. If it would be 100x better I probably would have heard that already and I didn't so...

Good luck,
Jan