Thanks for ALL the feedback. Although I felt anxiety about stopping my rendering process (since I was nearly 28 hours in already) to try out some of the suggestions, I went ahead and stopped it, hoping for the best. So, I rendered the file with only LOOKS and took off the DENOISER. That DENOISER FREE file took 7 hours. Once complete, I added DENOISER to that file and it took … 64 hours! So, a grand total of 71 hours … not counting all the other hours I lost from the previous efforts.
I looked at my Resource monitor during rendering and everything (CPU, Memory, Disk) was running with minimal resources. So, I’m still not sure how to improve the rendering — other than not using DENOISER.
I’ll definitely put more focus on not creating GRAINY footage in the future.