Media Encoder 2023 Literally Takes 2x ME 2021: What Gives?

Greetings all,

Trivia question--but I found the same nasty surprise as everyone else when I tried to start using the 2022 apps, including Media Encoder, namely that the 2022 versions aren't anywhere near as fast as the 2021 versions. A rough calculation showed about a 30% speed loss from 2021 to 2022, and now I've noticed an approximate 50% speed loss from 2021 to 2023. (A project that took 12 hours to export with 2021 has now been going for 23 hours and still isn't within sight of being done.) The video is about eight and a half minutes long, and relies heavily on dynamic-linked AE content, which is why it takes so long even under ideal circumstances.

I'm doing all this on the same hardware (I have the 2021, 2022, and 2023 apps all installed next to each other), and it's on an MSI Raider GE76 with an i9-11980HK with 64GB RAM and a geForce RTX 3080 laptop GPU.

So that leaves two questions--one, does anybody know what's causing this massive speed loss? And two, has anybody cracked the code on how to get 2023 to perform at the same speed standard as 2021? I'm missing out on a ton of new features and I know it, but I can't switch up to the 2023 apps because those documents aren't backwards-compatible with 2021.