Shaved an area, and got the main work loop down to 43 cycles- but the special case ending takes up a lot more cycles than ideal. Overall, pretty happy with this solution.  Even though the input-handling arm does less work than my previous iteration, the bend-building arm does significantly less work.  It helps that one of the polymer-building arms does work on the mors bend.

There's a swanky movement of the atoms in the special case that costs instructions, but ended up taking the same time as not doing it- and only because one of the arms is a little slow. Otherwise, it'd be actually one cycle faster.

If someone can find the special sauce (that i've so far failed to find) to move both bends across the output glyph without using all of spaces where the pistons are, I'll be really impressed. I was able to do it with either the vitae bend or the mors bend, but not both in the same solution, and attempts to shave gold by using less pistons but the same area were futile, or required too many cycles of work to pull off.