I didn't mean to "meanly" send you to a dog like Abe's. It's just that prices are set the same for all new camera equipment from authorized US sellers. Anyone selling for less is selling something questionable, typically grey market. "New" grey market is equipment exactly the same as 'authorized US' equipment, built in the same factory, tested to the same quality standards, but selling at a lower price and without a US warranty. So, if there's a problem that should have been a warranty issue / repair, you're going to have to pay instead, assuming the brand manufacturer will even look at it. Abe's is a notorious grey market seller, so if you were looking at price alone and not support, you'll see Abe's always seems to be the cheapest.

I am going nuts here with trying to clean up my dups.

I have used and routinely use Teekesselchen. It takes a wee bit of use to get comfortable with it. The duplicate search creates a Collection called Duplicates marking dupes with the same keyword ... Then it's just a matter of you manually vetting the marked images and unchecking 'keepers'.

Recommendation: create a test folder and copy 10-15 images (purposely including duplicate images) from your library into it. Then highlight that folder and run Teekesselchen to see how it works (suggested so you understand dupes are not automatically deleted)

http://www.bungenstock.de/teekesselchen/

Your process sounds very similar to mine. I started my filing system many years ago when I became the family historian. I was using Mac’s photos (or whatever it was named back then) and learned how to create folders in there. I do folders for decades, then years within the decades, then the events - named: YYYY-Event. Because I was doing this for my extended family, I also diligently face-tagged each photo and changed the dates of photos that I’d scanned, the oldest being mid-1800’s.

Fast forward to retirement, adopting the hobby of photography, taking a class to learn the camera, and being introduced to LR. My previous folder system, keyword tags, including faces, all ported nicely to LR. But, I continued to use both apps, now all new photos were going to LR, and any edited photos into Photos. Two libraries! YIKES!!!

At the beginning of the lockdown, I tackled the job and eliminated 30k duplicates. I also took additional LR courses and liked the functionality it offered. But here are a couple of things I learned along the way:

1) until it becomes ingrained and second nature to you…write down your process and refer to it frequently; this includes your definitions of the Star ratings, color codes, and the most critical key words (a post-it on my monitor worked well for me)

2) the sub-folders became more confusing, than helpful for me (I’d frequently forget to check and uncheck the show photos in sub-folders box), so I eliminated using them. Now if I need to separate .jpgs from Raw, etc. I just select file type as an attribute on the folder and limit what’s showing in my window.

Good luck on this journey…it’s a lot of work; but, very satisfying when complete! Happy New Year!!!

Reading through it sounds like different hoggers have different goals which will impact workflow and searchability.

My goal is to continue to use a standard naming convention for searching folders (year and eventname)
Folders contain a minimum of three sub folders (jpg, RAW, modified)
Modified photos are those that have been post processed, posted, printed or forwarded to recipients
Generally my modified photos are the "best of the best" out of the folder for that event.

My goal is now to go back through 21 years of digital photos stored on CD/DVD and upload them onto SSD and sort through them and perhaps post processed some jewels I never knew I had because I wasn't at the point of post processing that long ago due to lack of resources.

Getting a system and sticking to it seems to be the best way for any/all photographers to track and manage their work flow and valuable efforts and time.

Cheers to success in 2022 the big cull.

CCleaner is free and easy to use. You may want to do this is phases
1) "perfectly identical" not need to eyeball differences
Then when you might want to eyeball pairs in the next steps.
2) same name and size in bytes
3) same in name
start it
<tools>
<duplicate finder>
Then check Name, Size, and Content. IIRC Content does something like a Checksum so if 1 bit in 1 byte is changed there will not be a match.

Then go down the page and specify paths and filetypes to include and exclude.