The problem has now been resolved (thus far) by performing the following:
Complete removal of all clips / recordings and db files
Consolidated physical drives to use only three:
New - NVME
Stored - spinner
Archive - spinner
Consolidated storage plan:
New up to 800GB > Stored
Stored up to 16TB > Archive
Archive up to 16TB > Delete
Updated version to 5.8.x per BI support
These steps appear to have corrected my drive space issue as well as the goofy UI bugs. Wanted to throw this out there in case anyone else runs into this--there's hope...