My issue is when I get my keyframing all finished (jpg files), save them, and go to reload into the basic processes in lrtimelapse and then go back out to lightroom to "read metadata" before my export, lightroom then changes all my files back to unedited files - keyframes never develop the rest of the files, if that makes sense. 

What am I doing wrong? What's not updated or needs to be adjusted?

Could you please follow the advices given here and see if that helps:
http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-keyf...vise-versa

Ok I'm on it. Trying again. It's entirely possible I was working from two different folders - thanks for the quick reply, will let you know if this works. (Never had this issue before, so it's a headscratcher.)

Well, in moving folders around and trying desperately to get the LRT data away/off my images, I went to do a clean restart and deleted the entire folder, not realizing that after so many attempts that I had not copied the files, so the entire timelapse and all the hours spent trying to figure this out is now just gone so that's cool.

Sorry to hear. But I can tell you, it's normal to make errors while learning. Telling you from my own experience :-)