I've been using iTunes with VBR high and I'm reasonably happy with the quality. It's good enough that I don't hear any of the usual artifacts that can be really annoying (cymbals seem to get mauled by bad MP3 encoders). I tried the setup to use lame (you need some 3rd party scripts) and it does work, but it's an order of magnitude slower than the builtin encoder, where Apple has clearly done serious performance tuning.

Reripping sounds intriguing, but it's just not a high priority item right now. I still have hundreds of older CDs that I haven't ripped for the first time...