Don’t feel bad. I’m doing my transcoding with a 4th gen (Haswell) i5 and it takes 2-3 hours to transcode an hour-long show. I just let it run all night. We also have a Tivo Roamio OTA for time shifting (record now, watch later). I use KMTTG for stuff I want to keep, and Silicon Dust Quattro for bulk recording stuff I want to keep anyway or binge watch the whole season without tying up the Tivo or storage.
My experience is that H.265 encoding isn’t that much bigger for the same quality, and I can use my nVidia 2060 to do HW encoding to H.265. I’d have to upgrade to an RTX 40-series to get HW GPU encoding for AV1.
My main interest in using AV1 is the royalty-free aspect, meaning future device and open source project adoption is likely to be more widespread than products and projects that have additional MPEG encumbered licensing fees for H.264 and H.265 to consider.