"Anyhow, I've noticed a big improvement in speed while in LXDE. Especially when it comes to running moe than one program. While in KDE, if I had Chromium open, along with several pages/tabs, Gimp really started to strain when editing my toons."
with 2 gbs, yes, it would be a bit slow depending how much images you have opened to edit in gimp under kde4, i think it is on the limit there before start using swap
you can improve gimp usage to avoid a higher ram usage but probably you already know more about gimp than what i would dream of knowing so if you say it is not enough and lxde is doing great for you, good to know you have a good machine to work with

"So far, it's pretty snappy and responsive. In a small way, reminds me of the KDE 3.5 days."
i always had that same sensation, that lxde is practically kde 3.5, some love that but others don't like it