How do I successfully upgrade my iPhoto Library from 7.1.5 to 9.5.1

I've been running iPhoto on my MacBook for the past 6 years. I've accumulated a library of 280GB of photos. I had iPhoto '08 v 7.1.5 (387). Recently, I got a new Mac running Mavericks and iPhoto 9.5.1. Using the Migration Assistant, I copied my library over to the new Macbook Pro, along with all my other files. I opened iPhoto on the new mac, and it showed a completely empty library. A 'du' from the command line (as well as Info in Finder) of the iPhoto library showed it had 280GB of space taken up, so the files were copied over correctly. Running 'find . -print | xargs md5 | sort' on both libraries before before trying to run the new iPhoto produced identical checksum on all the files (I wiped the new mac, reinstalled Mavericks and migrated again before running this on the new library).
I've also tried copying the old library to an external hard disk, same results (on file systems formatted to ignore case as well as those formatted to respect case, in all cases it was a MacOS Extended partition).
I've also tried creating a new library on the old mac, putting 2 photos in it, editing those photos (to flip and crop them). I copied it over to the new Mac (volume formatted as Mac OS Extended, ignore case, journalled), verified that I was using the proper path to this new library and that the files were identical. Same result.
Over the past two months I've tried everything I could find. One thread said I needed a migration program from such an old version of iPhoto for the Mac, so I tried downloading that from this forum, but it told me I didn't need it when I ran it.
I've tried dragging individual folders of the Originals and Modified directories over. That got my photos transferred, but the events were all messed up and the assiciation between the Original and Modified photos was lost. Since I have 43,995 photos, 23747 of which have been modified, I don't find this to be an acceptable migration path.
I tried posting this to another thread on failure of iPhoto to upgrade properly to Mavericks, but was requested to post a new thread due to protocol in these forums, so here is the new thread after making an admittedly snarky comment that Apple totally dropped the ball on this upgrade path and that it totally doesn't work. It should be this hard for a clueful computer professional with 30 years of experience to get it right.
Yours In Frustration.

There's actually an option to iPhoto Library Manager that makes this all almost work flawlessly (and work well enough for me). With the exception of Photo Albums that the pictures are part of, if you select "Library > Rebuild Library..." and then select "Scavange Orphaned Photos" check box, then it will put all the Photos and Movies into the "Scavanged Photos" album. It matches the modified pictures to their originals. It preserves all the event names and photo groupings. All the meta-data I could spot check it got right (although with 44k pictures, I only checked a few). If you fail to select this option, however, it will find no pictures at all when it goes to rebuild the library (this was true of the small test libraries I tried as well as the big, monster 280GB library I just finished converting). The conversion process took 5 hours to run, but in the end produced a library my new iPhoto can read and that I can interact with. I'll be suggesting to the iPhoto Library Manager folks a notation that would estimate the number of Orphaned Photos and display that number as a hint to the user that the option would be useful.
Edited: Thanks to Old Toad and LarryHN for their help in finding which of the many options to transition this library to 9.5.1 I needed to use. Sorry if I took my frustration of the past several months out on you guys for generously trying to help me.

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