Baffled with a simple bond throughput, can't get more than a Gig

@ewwhite right. I'll just explain some thing. When you test your link between two machines, you use only one NIC, LACP will not split packets across multiple interfaces for a single stream/thread. For example a single TCP stream will always send/receive packets on the same NIC. So you could see higher speed only when test with more then one destination. There is good answer, where it described.

It seems like bonding and LACP are one of the worst understood concepts in networking.

But the short explanation is that you'll never achieve more than one connection's throughout with a single source-destination pair. If you need more bandwidth on a single connection, you'll have to move to 10GbE.