Thought to drop by & say thanks all for the suggestions & feedback. After a hard look in the mirror of what I needed just ended up with a Galaxy 9.6. I've found over some days that there exist the same vagaries as with other computers in terms of applications keeping up with OS.
One example would be that App A that facilitates exported Google Earth overlays worked good with OS A but with OS B.0.1 won't recognize the files if they're stored on removable SD card, vs. the inboard memory. This kind of stuff is not a huge issue to me; I don't expect something with a battery to read my mind & don't mind a couple of taps into my files to fire up the file. Only mention because it's a familiar type of thing that exists in the tablet community as well as larger computers. (This one comes witih Android 6.0.1) But I can pull up all my fishing spots off-line (for when the water gets softer & the bass wake up).
One thing I did notice is the above exists quite a bit and could be mitigated by simply making a better decision when mounting the MicroSD card expansion. I selected the option to make it removable storage, rather than integrate it into the 16GB already on the tablet. My tactical side out-foxed my long-term process; really if I need removable that's what I have a thumb-drive and a dongle for. So I will do a temp copy back over to save some stuff & re-install as a regular onboard. Just something to think about HARD when someone's installing their additional little SD card, before you make the key-press when it's asking you about whether you want to format that SD chip as onboard storage.
As the Admiral recuperates in her Lazy-Boy it was completely worth the purchase to sit together and literally do some Christmas shopping and let the transporters take care of the delivery while seeing what she's ordering. For that, worth every penny. Battery life is pretty good - but then I disabled a bunch of the default Samsung & Google shit, don't run outdoor brightness on the display, and use the toggle to turn the WiFi off when I'm just reading. The 10.1 with some resolution improvements had been under consideration but one reason they put that bigger battery in there is that all that stuff comes with a price in terms of battery endurance. Most of these things seem to have a resolution greater than the thing they're looking at. Analogy: Don't need a multimeter good to .02% tolerance if the components you're working on have +-10% of manufacturing slop built in anyway.
Cost was a non-Cyber Monday $160 plus a price-matched 64GB chip & a hearty-laugh and a "YGBSM" when the in-store-visiting Samsung rep tried to steer me to a $100 Otterbox.
Not much into games or apps, but did find a good & simple little WiFi signal analyzer that showed many people in the neighborhood all stuck in the same channel on their router - seeing that and 2 minutes into the router to select a channel all by my lonesome yielded a small-but-noticeable performance increase. That & the aforementioned utility to incorporate my existing KMZ files on GoogleEarth are about it. It already reads PDF's fine and will play MP3's if I want to put some music on it.
Pretty happy and wanted to say thanks again gents. Now time to go move powder while it's powder before it becomes rock. Wonder how many layers the talking-heads will have on today for the Packer-Bears game, LMAO. Someone down in Sierra Vista asked me once how we deal with this; I told him we have these things called buildings and we go in them.