Hi - ISSUE RESOLVED
I like to thank the forum for the help. It was greatly appreciated!!
It seems my issue was resolved and really the components to the resolution were; 1) Rclone changes as documented above, 2) B2 modifying the LifeCycle settings for saving all versions (the default) to just the most recent and 3) creating a couple more buckets and spreading out my files. BackBlaze B2 support indicated B2 API list_files (which list approximately 1,000 a time) is resource intensive and is triggered any time there is a change which in our real time environment is often. 4) making the Windows file explorer setting aka dumbing down helped greatly.
Thank you again. Regards, Mark.