Good news anyone who is interested!
So I poked more buttons… honestly, what I am doing should not work, so I am going to try to explain it in a way that exposes what I consider a problem to Epic, as well as clears up some confusion that I simply CAN’T be the only one dealing with.
MY COOK TIMES ARE AGAIN DOWN TO LESS THAN ONE MINUTE!
With a content folder well over 16GB. Yeah!
Depending on how much content you have changed since your last cook, these times will vary, and it definitely takes an informed user to figure out just what maps need to be cooked and when (reference viewing is wonderful), but this should help anyone trying to reduce cook times.
Basically, any dynamically spawned blueprints can ignore all maps being cooked… EXCEPT ONE for some odd odd reason UE4 thinks it necessary that you always cook at least one map with this method. If you do not, it will basically default to cooking everything, sometimes multiple times, and I have no idea why! Yay Game Engines!
I would recommend adding a map to your game with nothing in it to serve this function as your dummy map. It cooks faster, because nothing is referenced in it.
It is important to remember which maps have static references to the blueprints you change, because although you may cook the changed blueprint, the old cooked map still has a reference to your old blueprint, which can only change by recooking the map it was in.
Below is my setup screenshot, which is good as a reference so long as you keep the above in mind.
I think that is it… let me know if I need to clarify! Maybe Epic could shed some more light on this topic too? 
Best,
Spiris
