I think I have something. Prior to patch, back in the day, they recommended that I only use one processor to avoid potential issues with dupes and 'others'. A contact of mine there reached out to the support team and suggested that we turn off (as in blank) the concurrency limit on the deployment and let them manage it. (yeah, that sounds frightening to me too).
But tested it twice this morning so far, and we're back down to 5 minutes... So that seems to be the answer.
At least it's worth trying.