Some help re: iPhoto / Apeture & Workflow best practise

Hey everyone,

I am posting because I could use a little advice on "best workflow" practise and some general tips for iPhoto. Sorry in advance if any of these questions are a bit newbie. I am currently using the latest version of iPhoto on Mountain Lion - and have used iPhoto for the past 3.5 years when I bought my Macbook Pro from new.

However, up until now I have tended to just create a new "Album" for each set of photos (days out etc) and just dumped all the raw images in there. Occasionally I export a few raw photos to my desktop and then play around with them using Snapspeed which I also bought as it was fairly cheap and gave me quick and good-looking results for sharing photos with friends on Facebook etc.

I am now approaching 11,000 photos in my iPhoto library, and figured it's time to do some housekeeping. With that in mind, I have these few questions:

1) Is Aperture really worth purchasing? I had a play with Lightroom 4 trial, and just could not get on with the interface at all, and did not like the fact that it wasn't fully integrated into the Mac OS. I am not disputing the program, as it is excellent, but I guess I have just got so used to iPhoto. The thing that is putting me off are the bad reviews on the App store complaining about stability problems and general sluggish performance. I have experienced similar with iPhoto for quite a long time. It crashes at least 1-2 times per night whilst working on photos (system is 100% stable as I have stress tested it). Should I just stick with iPhoto and Spapspeed?

2) Are there any ways to "actually" delete a photo from iPhoto? As I am browsing through my albums, some pictures are totally worthless as they are out of focus etc. I realise just hitting backspace removes them from the current folder/library view, but they are still present in the Master photos folder?

3) Could you guys recommend a general workflow? I keep hearing about people doing things in different orders/different programs etc. At the moment I just dump all the raw files from the camera into a temporary folder on my desktop, and then import into iPhoto, creating a new folder for each trip out. To be honest, I don't touch 99.9% of the photos ever again..... (:-O)

4) Is there any easy way to tweak many photos in 1 go (batch mode?) - or am I right in thinking such a feature would be pointless as each photo will require individual attention?

5) Can you recommend any other way of categorizing or storing my photos in iPhoto? Does anyone make a high quality JPEG of their raw files and then have a duplicate album with them in? At the moment, when browsing my photos.... you are infact browsing unedited raw files.... this is probably not the best way of doing things?

P.S. Time is not an issue at the moment as I have a few weeks off from work - so even if I have to go through most of the pictures individually, this is not a massive problem.

Apolagies for the long-winded post, and thanks so much for reading and of course, any help you can offer.

Thank You.