*************************My Question******************
Are there any downsides / unexpected "Gotchas" to starting Lazarus every time as "Admin" by default as I have done???
Yes, there are a few, among them: any program you start from an elevated program, i.e, one that has admin rights, also has admin rights, which means that the program can delete and/or modify .exe or .dlls that it normally would not have access to. This applies to your own programs when you're debugging them.
All that said, the risk is low as long as you exercise a minimum amount of care. It should also be mentioned that sometimes it is necessary to start Lazarus with admin rights when using GDB to debug a program you've written if that program needs admin rights to do whatever it's supposed to do (otherwise UAC starts a new elevated instance which is not the one expected by GDB making GDB very unhappy. Note: this may (should?) also happen with fpdebug.)
For the record, most of the time I run Lazarus and a few other programs with admin rights, particularly those I trust because I've been using them for a long time. I find the UAC thing mostly annoying but I still like to have it in the background, just in case.
HTH.