I never did find the perfect solution unfortunately. In the end BuddyPress Simple Events proved to be the best solution for me. It’s clean, simple and straight forward to use. I found the others were quite bloated in feature sets and weren’t the best from a user experience perspective.
Thank you! However, that still doesn’t solve the issue. On uploading the images are still being massively compressed. For example a 1.6mb image is going to roughly 155KB. Any ideas?