Update/solved.
So I finally got back to work on this project. I did installed another image on the Kingston card and ran dnf update. It took > 8 hours.
On the advice from my friend I purchased a Class 3 SanDisk "Extreme" 32 GB micro SD card. The packaging claims reads at 90 MB/sec (600x) and writes at 60 MB/sec (400x).
# time dnf update with this card now yields: real 37m8s, user 27m39s sys 4m36s. At least 16x faster. And the current dnf update is larger than what I was running several weeks ago.
#dnf install rygel takes a 5 minutes instead of over an hour.
Bottom line: the SD card (speed) makes a huge difference in the speed of an RPi3.
Thanks for the help.