Thank you so very much for taking the time to write that @hokierulz. No need to apologize for being wordy as I do not mind re-examining the fundamentals here.
To start, I would like to re-emphasize that this is something that is recent. It used to be that this did not occur and the transcoding was just as crisp on all stations as I am seeing it on the CBS station.
Another aspect to be aware of is that there is another issue I have been battling and it’s this one:
I recently installed the latest drivers for NVidia for this issue and it is around this time that this problem surfaced (there are also RegEdits that I made as well and wonder if that is related).
(I tried uninstalling the drivers without much luck, either)
Anyways, this problem happens even on the same machine, which is local and wired to itself, obviously. The screenshot I took above was actually from the Plex server itself, with it acting as the (web) client. It happens there and on the two Rokus, so I am thinking this is a server-related problem for sure.
As for the GPU, it is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050. I am now wondering if this GPU is not being utilized at all and that is leading to the degraded experience. This gets back to the drivers and perhaps them not working correctly or a poor registry configuration. I’ve checked and double-checked the registry and everything looks OK but I have not ruled anything out yet.
The other thing I tried was the server Transcode → Transcode Quality settings. I tried Prefer higher quality encoding and that did not do anything. I didn’t bother to try Make my CPU Hurt as there wasn’t a difference but I suppose I will try this just to be sure.
Anyways, it is me that is being wordy now in hopes of kicking out another clue to figure out what is going on here. 
Thank you for any continued assistance/insight you can provide.
