Hi John,
what’s your reason for 60fps? 24fps is the more “cinematic” frame rate and you only need to render 240 frames instead of 600 per clip.
If your animation is relatively slow, meaning things don’t change too much from one frame to the next you can render even less frames and “slow down” the animation in AE.
Let’s say you have a simple 2 keyframe animation. and use 24fps, you have one cam keyframe at 0 and the last at 239. Move that last keyframe to 120 and your animation runs twice as fast.
I use a AE plugin called Twixtor to slow down the animation back to the original 240 frames.
Twixtor is really good in creating these in-between frames. This alone will cut your render time in half.
You might be able to use AE built-in slow-mo tools (not sure, I’m still on CS6).
Because of re-timing, I would do motion blur (RSMB) in AE instead of baking into frame.
I don’t think reducing polys will help much, if at all. Not sure if squeezing sampling balance will introduce flicker.
I think 10-16min. including bloom/glare is already pretty good. Is that on single machine or farm? Maybe render a half or quarter res test before sending to farm.
Good luck!