Also East TN. Took myself and the wife about 40 minutes of waiting to get ours cast.

This is really a head scratcher. I’m no Klipper expert when it comes to really tinkering with the printer.cfg, however if I was in your situation the next place I would go with troubleshooting would be on the firmware side of things. Klipper already makes regular backups of your important configs so maybe try making a copy of them and do a clean install of Klipper with a default printer.cfg for your printer and see if that helps narrow down the issue some more. Saves you having to spend money on hardware if you don’t end up actually needing it.

I’d say a Neo based on how the fan shroud looks

I swapped to direct drive myself. Went with the Creality Sprite Pro since I already had mounted a CR touch to my print head.I thought it made the most sense for interoperability.

I would consider looking into Klipper. That would be a fantastic upgrade and there are plenty of videos on how to go about it. The documentation for the project is also easy to parse.

It was the first major upgrade I did to my Ender 3 that I got back in July. Way too spoiled by it at this point to go back to Marlin.