Well. Unfortunately not. After experimenting over the last two weeks, Merge Using Overlaps didn’t fare any better - even adding control points didn’t fix the issue: RC would realign the component with hundreds of pixels of error on the control points, torquing and twisting the scene out of recognition.
Exporting XMPs did work a little better, but unfortunately that workflow seems to lock down further refinement: attempting to realign after a few adjustments yields an error saying (approximately) “All XMP-imported photosets or laser scans must be aligned at once: incremental addition is not supported” which is sort of an arrow to the knee, considering the align isn’t perfect and needs to be tweaked.
The strange thing is that every single ‘piece’ of the scene (300-600 cams) will align just fine: it’s putting them together into 1000+ cam components that starts causing issues.