I'm adding polygons at an astounding rate, so it's taking longer and longer to render since I can't use my GPU (it seems to have memory issues with Cycles). I think I'm up to around 20-30 min for even these small pictures. My samples rate is a 1024, I think I'd double it (at least) for final pics. If I'm still getting noise then well... it'll take some fixing that's for sure. Or I may just cheat and do as you suggest and render larger and squish it.