Good tip Dave and good discussion. I do this everyday for our fab shop, but we do not need to have the laser profile dxf file as a polyline. I'm curious why your laser software requires this. I suspect that doing this might force you to eliminate any extraneous short segments - anything shorter than the beam offset causes a program error. We always send the layout as lines and arcs. The only other thing we do is for ellipses, turn pellipse on, this turns the ellipse into short segments that the laser program handles (this involves redrawing the ellipse). BTW, we use NCell and NC Express for our Mits lasers and Finn-Power laser, and sometime Fabriwin for hand-coding.
One way to quickly eliminate the bendlines and bendnotes is turn off sketches on the drawing template and then right click the flat view, click properties and turn off display sheet metal bend notes. I do this before adding any other notes or dim's to the drawing view. Then use edit, copy to DWGeditor to put the view into dwgeditor. I stopped using Autocad for transferring patterns last year and find dwg faster. Some parts of this can be automated with a macro, and perhaps someone with programming skills could automate the whole process.
Diego