Thanks everyone! Really appreciate all the nice comments. You guys are ! :o
@RI3DVIZ: If you don’t count endless -and futile- experimenting with Speedtree wind and procedural foliage volumes, it took a day. Include named experiments, 2 days. Guessing some 6 hours or so per day.
I’m on a i7 X980 3.33GHZ, 24GB ram, 500GB SSD, Titan-X, the latter being the only top notch component in my pc 
VXAO is very easy to setup. Downloading and compiling the VXGI version of the engine might seem a bit daunting for some at first, but it really isn’t very complicated (more annoying that it’s separate). Once that’s done, using VXAO is just a toggle in your ini or via console. You can tweak a lot of settings in your PPV or via console.