ok-ish news: wafrn is now using some of the indexes it was not using. turns out that mariadb was flat out ignoring most of the indexes that were on the database.
Creating the same schema on mysql said "oi fucker you're trying to create an index on a text field and you havent told me how long you want it"
After doing some changes the slow queries file now fills a lot slower. Still some, but I feel like I can pump up some stuff on the number of workers