Great suggestions. I appreciate it. I had been printing @ 600 dpi too ensure that imported pdfs and renderings printed clearly. 96 dpi was fine for everything except the imported pdfs and that brought the file down to 2MB. I settled on 300 dpi which was clear enough for the pdfs with a file size around 6MB.
All that being said, I am curious why my imported pdfs bog it down so much when in X5 I never ran into this issue using all the same settings.