I modified the https-dns-proxy and am happy to report I didn’t brick anything and my DNS woes are resolved. I have to say, it is very rare that I have been provided the level of support I have received here, and I very much appreciate it.
Hopefully it will survive updates, but if not, it ultimately took about 10 minutes to do and I have saved my changes in our internal Git repo, so it will be very easy to apply again if firmware updates default it to the previous behavior.
Thanks again (Alta-Matt) and (Alta-Jeff) are my heros! 