Thank you for the excellent feedback. I've still got to pick a better-for-me saddle -- another topic on itself. I thought that I had the saddle/bar height and reach dialed in, but I will make some adjustments and observations along those lines. I think that you identified the core issue -- I simply need more experience and training to gain the skill and strength to be more comfortable.

Being a geek, I wish I could rig up a set of pressure sensors on the seatpost, bottom bracket and headset connected to a RaspberryPi so that I could actually see how my perceptions line up to reality. Ah, well. That is a topic for another forum as well.