First, thanks for all the feedback and suggestions, I’ve been going through and looking for areas to tweak. I decided, in the interim, to print a bigger model to see if I can expose the issues more, and I think I accomplished that. This is the snail from Adventure Time, and I’m mostly very happy with this print; I could have added a tree support under the lower arm, but the detail is great and the layer lines are barely visible…until you get to the raised hand a bit, and to the eye stalks. Looking at what’s going on, it looks pretty clear the layers are NOT getting enough time to cool and harden before the next starts.

I thought I had that accounted for with the following settings, but as far as I can tell, these settings are not being respected:

I would expect the printer to slow down a bit to its minimum, then when the minimum layer time is reached, it would go off to the side…but I think instead it’s hovering close to the print and not giving it space to cool down.

I don’t really want to switch slicers, but I am wondering if there’s some Cura tip to uncover what I’m doing wrong here; I’ve read a ton but I am just not understanding how to get the printer to take its time on these tiny objects.

Here is a video of it printing, it’s clearly not respecting the minimum layer time: https://photos.app.goo.gl/nhE7LjvDH9avutxd7