I learned a lot with Neat, years ago, and wanted to go the deeper I could into it, to really master its strength once for always...
The fact is I found it quite impossible.
Actually its huge assets are also what can quickly become a burden : even if you found a rock solid WF, it is very hard not to try "just a tiny altered tweak of a noise sample" to see what difference may results on the image... And you can twek the way you keep the sample, you can tweak the way it's taken into account one step further etc...
It is somehow never finished, because another option test can pop up in your mind and torture you until you finally give up and give it a test. And you surely all know that test with Neat Video can last forever

...
In Resolve, it's more focused on quick answers but also efficiency. Less options doesn't mean you give up quality.
In the end, I can understand the OP, especially the "waste of time" part : I don't agree, but I can
understand it. I'm indeed really not sure anymore that you cannot be very close to Neat's result with Resolve's built-in NR in barely every situations...
*MacMini M1 16 Go - Sonoma - Ext nvme SSDs on TB3 - 14 To HD in 2 x 4 disks USB3 towers
*Legacy MacPro 8core Xeons, 32 Go ram, 2 x gtx 980 ti, 3SSDs including RAID
*Resolve Studio everywhere, Fusion Studio too
*https://www.buymeacoffee.com/videorhin