I will set up a test if I have to but wondering if anyone knows directly, and whether hand-editing to reduce the XML to just the fields I want is generally considered a good idea.

idk about generally a good idea, but i did this when i ran into issues pushing a form w/ a bunch of dependencies on FAM custom fields from a bundle. in my case i was getting an error where the same form in SB had a mandatory = F, but in prod (where i was pushing it to), mandatory didn't exist as an attribute. i just removed the "mandatory" attribute in the XML and pushed and it worked fine. in my case i wasn't too worried about it because the fields were all hidden anyway. YMMV on removing them entirely from the XML.

thanks @amy - I would feel best if I didn't hand edit things, but it appears avoiding it may be impossible.

agreed - would be a nice feature in the future to like “exclude bundled fields” or something like that.