More data: on a whim, I copied the optimized model from my workstation and ran the Depth Viewer. Obviously the Depth Viewer did not consider the copied model to be applicable, and it prompted me to optimize the neural model. This time it worked! I am now getting stable depth resolution as expected. I repeated this process twice and it worked both times. As a final test, I removed all optimized models and ran the Depth Viewer, and this optimization worked as well.
My immediate need has been answered, but I’m still curious why the command line method of neural optimization failed in such way.