Thanks for all the replies!
After reading this, doing some more research, and (most importantly) talking to a local friend who has a side business selling and renting ebikes and doing conversions (he was out of town for a few weeks on an ebike tour when I first posted this) I am leaning towards the BBSHD.
With the hills here he strongly recommends the mid-drives, unless we want to do a bit of pedaling ourselves, which for these bikes we don’t. I should acknowledge that we are not getting these for exercise, we are looking at them as electric motor scooters that we can still park in a bike rack. We have regular bikes, and we ride them plenty. The ebikes are for when we DON’T want to be exercising.
As far as the BBS02 vs BBSHD, he thinks that either have plenty of power for what we want but has found the BBSHD to be more robust and reliable. He has installed many of each, and has seen a few (as in "few", not "a lot") BBS02 units burn up on the hills, though it was likely user error (pushing too high a gear up these hills?)
Long of the short was that either would be a good bet, but If we could swing the extra money for the BBSHD, he thought it was worth it. He also recommended we get the kits from Luna (but I will take a look at EM3ev as well). And the smaller batteries should have the range we need if we want to keep the cost down.
Another thing pushing me to the more powerful mid-drive options is that I realized I was hardly ever riding my commuter bike for errands anymore, and the hill was the reason. When we lived in town where it is flat, I did almost all errands, including grocery shopping, on my bike. Having a bike that lets me haul a big load of groceries up the hill is going to let me go back to doing more things on the bike again.
Someone asked about my friend with the front hub motor: It does get him up the hill, but the steepest parts (what are like what our whole hill is like) require real pedaling on his part. It is fine for what he uses it for and what he wants - to get some exercise coming home from work without the full kick-in-the-stomach that pedaling up these hill scan be - but that is not what I am looking for.
Anyway, thanks again for the input.