Ok this is progress.
This is the solution:
You can try quickly to force 30FPS by clicking the “Use Default Sample Rate” within the animation drop-down. This does take processing time compared to just a straight import though.
However that is not the setting I see.
I see Custom Sample Rate. And I set it to 24 which was the animation rate. It was left at 0 by default and I guess it must be sampling at a much higher rate. “if 0 find automatically the best sample rate”.
Set at 24 the animation now loads within seconds which is expected. Even if you wanted to animate at 60 I am sure this would be fine. But I will have to tweak it to get the most accurate animation it seems from tests.
The export option for sample rate is in Blender ambiguous. Looking at the manual it shows Sample Rate as a “To Do” meaning it is still not explained. However by default Unity has no issues with this at all. Unreal for some reason wants to sample a zillion frames by default. Should this be considered a bug or a feature request? At least the default setting should be considered.
At any rate,
Thank you for the solution!