What I ended up doing is taking my slide show from encore, creating a whole new encore project with ONLY the slide show, rendering it out as a .flv file, then inserting that file into the final Blu-Ray and removing the actual slide show files from the disc (turns slide show into one movie). The only reason I did this was because I LOVE the ease at which a slide show can be created in encore. Very easy to set up etc...
So let me ask you this one last question. I have only used encore for building slide shows. If you can build a slide show in premiere, is it comparibley easy? or do you have to painstakingly animate every single transition and animation? If you know of an easy way, I would LOVE to know. Because I haven't found it. That would be a HUGE help. Thank you.