For sure! And yes parts of it involve raster data. It doesn't help that I have very little control over the raster internals. My project is limited to NY,OR,WA

For sure! And yes parts of it involve raster data. It doesn't help that I have very little control over the raster internals. My project is limited to NY,OR,WA, but this clearly has a potential sparse raster problem. If I was doing it in code, I'd reach for internally tiled cloud-optimized geotiffs with low compression and I'd be pretty sure that all the empty tiles would get compressed down to nothing. With QGIS, I can cross my fingers and hope it's doing something relatively sane with GDAL in the background.