Ok, I'm trying again . . .

I dumped the background I was using and put in something less complex, with less displacement. I set the camera with an f-stop of 2.8 in order to get a shallow depth of field. I'm running the render with 10 pixel samples this time.

It took 30 minutes to precalculate IDL and subsurface scattering.  We'll see about the rest . . .