Problem solved. I'm solving all my own problems. That's the way you guys like it. Better to let him figure out how to fish than to just give him a fish. Cuz he'll just hungry again and pester us some more. OK - so I was inviting in all these dozens and dozens of warning and hints which had nothing to do with my own code.
The reason that they were appearing is that in my project inspector I had explicit include paths to files which were inside packages. Instead of just making the package a "Required Package".
Now I've gotten rid of all my cherry-picked explicit paths to individual .pas files and have simply made the packages that they belong to "Required". This shut down all the warnings and hints from code that is not mine. I like it - now I can attack my own foibles and not be distracted by everything else in the ecosphere.