I have settled on the use of hard drives with backups to a NAS RAID5. For me, it seems the most flexible, least time consuming, and accomodating of future needs and growth. The NAS isn't even on most of the time, which should extend its life greatly - only operating during backups and occasional storage use. Backups can be done automatically overnight, as well as restorations if something were to happen. Hard drives provide the speed of access, and the NAS the flexibility to backup from anywhere on the network unattended.
CD/DVD is just too time consuming of a process - from burning/swapping to the nightmare thought of having to restore them to another media.
I just haven't figured out the system I will stick with in managing multiple hard drives. I am hoping Lightroom will address this in the released version, or I will continue to use Imatch.