Dropping both Blur Radius to .5 and Shadow samples to 16 cut the render time to 1:32 (hours:minutes!).  I know - I made two changes so I don't know which one had the impact.

I then dropped Shadow samples to 4 (leaving Blur Radius at .5) and render time is down to 32:14 (minutes:seconds!!!!!).  That's still a little long for a draft render.  I'm going to dread the final render(s).

I still like what I'm getting so I'm going to play with a couple of other things later tonight and see what happens.

Is there any documentation on what units the Blur Radius is in?  Is there any documentation on Shadow samples at all?  There's not much in the Reference Manual (shadow samples is not mentioned at all that I could see).  I did a quick scan of the forum and didn't find anything definitive.

Once again, thanks for the input, it is appreciated.