Any Illustrator Experts Out There?

Any master of the minutia of Adobe Illustrator out there who can help me?

Here is the issue. Filters and effects are technically supposed to produce the same visual results. But when I run Skribble & Tweak with the same settings in each one I get very different results. I like the effects one, but I have two problems.

1 - the result is something so complex that my 1.9GHz machine slows to a crawl.

2 - I can't edit the visible curves only the original, very different looking ones.

So what I'd like to do is either render the effects out as regular bezier curves, or be able to recreate the effect using filters. So far I've struck out on both counts, am I missing something?