Thanks for the insights, @David53. Focal Blur does still work for me, but the post-effect had been a simpler interface and faster process, which worked quite well from Rhino 7 until some recent update within Rhino 8.
I’m teaching this concept to classes of new CAD modelers and the post-effect version was by far easier to teach with. The results were predictably good (until very recently), you only have to click in one spot, and changing the values doesn’t cause the cycles to start over from the beginning which saves LOTS of time.