On rejects...
FWIW, I finally went ahead and dialed down my Intensity this morning a little bit to see what the effect would be on rejects. I had been running intensity at 21 which maxed my hashpower. I dropped down to 19 and the effect on hashpower was a loss of roughly 5%. After a few hours of running @19, reject percentage seems to have dropped by 2/3 (from close to 15% to around 5%) and from being consistently well above the poolwide reject % to being consistently at or below it.