tried resetting the Magic Wand settings. Changed it to assigning nodes every 4' linear rather a close fit to the spline. The effect of this, was that converting AC13 splines to ArchiTerra Contours went faster.
However, the simple act of creating splines before ever converting them via ArchiTerra continues to taken massive amounts of time as before, irrespective of the number of nodes in each spline. Very Frustrating!