You're correct: Lightroom does not have all the same sharpening abilities as Photoshop. In Photoshop you can sharpen in a dozen different ways - from the simple "sharpen" and "sharpen more" to "unsharp mask" to the high pass filter. That's not to say that you can't get sharp images out of Lightroom, though, if the original image was in focus and well exposed.
Couple of thoughts about your first post:
The file size (in KB) doesn't have much to do with how good the image looks. 500k seems pretty large for an image that's only 1000 pixels on the long edge, especially for web sharing.
The "Quality" slider is a little misleading. Depending on the content of the image, you can often crank the "Quality" slider way down without any perceptible losses in the image. And, though it goes against common sense, a "busier" picture can often get by with a LOWER quality setting, while a simpler picture with wide expanses of a single color will often require a higher quality setting. Read more about it here:
http://regex.info …room-goodies/jpeg-quality
If you're doing web sharing, make sure you TURN ON your output sharpening. Set it to Screen Sharpening and Standard... if it's photos of your cars, maybe even set it to High. This will re-render the sharpening effects after the image is resized to 1000px. The Sharpen sliders are primarily applied to the original, full-sized file. When the file is shrunk down to web size, you've gotta sharpen it again, and that's what the Output Sharpening panel is for.
If it's an important project and I want to do the best possible job on each individual photo, I'll do all the sharpening in Photoshop. However, for many images at a time, this isn't always feasible... I simply can't spend an hour editing every photo I take.
