Hello,
Answering my own question, to those that may come a-googling:
Apparently the newest "stable" version incorporates it, and so it should become a "common fixture" for the time being:
On a related note: adding the --low-level-retries option as recommended above had the unfortunate side effect of also adding numerous and useless retries to other errors, specially from long-sized dir and file names, see On-the-fly encryption support · Issue #219 · rclone/rclone · GitHub . This has caused my transfers to stall completely for many hours when rclone stumbled upon a long-size-named directory containing lots of files... :-/ So I'm redoing it but specifying --exclude="????...????*" (with 175 '?' characters) in the command line as @ncw recommended here: Skip long titled folder? --max-name-length · Issue #762 · rclone/rclone · GitHub
EDIT: the limit that worked for me was 160 characters, not 175; see my comment here: Skip long titled folder? --max-name-length · Issue #762 · rclone/rclone · GitHub
Cheers,
Durval.