Hi Dave,
Thank you for the taking the time to explain your workflow, which sounds like textbook procedure and surely leads to great results, as you've demonstrated
I can only add comments from my experience and hopefully I can be of help. I've followed a similar workflow as yours as well when traveling to a dark site, but found the following to help reduce setup time and also PA accuracy is more accurate (since the zero values in the Nexstar remote are theoretical based on your input - but can still be very accurate. To really get them spot on you'd need the starsense accessory, which plate solves and gives you an actual PA error readout on the controller).
Here are my steps for alignment with the AVX
1. Rough PA with Polarscope
2. Confirm PA with SC (I use the imaging scope but if your focal length is high you can use the guidescope)
3. Connect Nexstar remote to PC and fire up Nexremote (newer controllers have the USB port)
4. In Nexremote, select quick align, which assumes perfect PA to base it's go-to slews and does not perform any subsequent alignment steps. This assumption is ok, since as we'll see below, plate solving will ensure that the go-to will align correctly.
5. Connect Cartes Du Ciel (or your own choice of planetarium) to Celestron ASCOM driver and slew to any target. You can even use the Nexstar remote handset or Nextremote on your PC to slew to your target, doesn't matter as long as RA DEC coordinates are communicated by ASCOM
6. Plate solve target in SC and enable sync mount
7. Begin adjustments to initiate maging that target and then start imaging
8. When finished with the target, slew to another, plate solve and repeat.
I find this approach faster and more accurate, as it has me setup and up and running to step 6-7 above in about 5-10 minutes, so about half the time.
I've adapted to this workflow whenever I have a PC irregardless of whether I'm in the backyard or at a dark site. The closest I got to the above without a PC was using the Starsense accessory with my AVX, but because I've yet to find a faster more accurate workflow, I always make sure I have my PC with Sharpcap on it when I setup.
Hope this helps
Minos