Excellent point, CB, that's the kind of sense I try to make!
Regarding my difficulties with ROHQ, I believe I'm getting warmer here, and it really IS my fault (my fault for buying a hifalutin graphics subsystem).
It turns out the Radeon 6770m 2gb card is set by default to be switchable between it and the onboard intel gfx chip. The default mode is "automatic", with user-configurable modes on a per-application basis. This convoluted setup was apparently intended to achieve power savings--meaningless when the laptop is plugged in. Moreover, there are many reports of a long-standing issue with EVER getting the Radeon to switch to high-powered graphics.
But thanks to the in-ter-net, I learned how to configure the BIOS so that none of that switching nonsense occurs when plugged in. Forget per-application graphics, I have a graphics card now, and the darn thing seems to work.
Since I made this change my screen no longer jumps around from low- to high-resolution when I'm configuring Red October. It appears each new application (MadVR, for example) was defaulting on startup to low-power gfx, and then getting upgraded a half-second later to hi-res, by which time MadVR had thrown up its arms and given up--as I almost did.
CONCLUSION:
There's just no way to get a fair shake in this world. Switchable graphics? Graphics systems have worked fine for two decades, and did everything they needed to do. So it took them 20 years to figure out how to break that?