Shrug. what you said and what I did were slightly different, however I got my document smaller. I am perplexed by your suggestion to use the Adobe PDF printer, considering the steps i listed in the final set of bulleted items in the original post clearly identify my lack of success with printing to the Adobe PDF printer resulting in an increase in file size from 12 to 16 MB and not a reduction.
Reprinting the entire document, then re-scanning the paper to an uncompressed PDF at about 78 MB (I did two jobs, there were 10 tabs, I tried the first tab and it came out at 12 MB and after optimizing the scanned document, reduced 12 to 0.87. The second job was tabs 2 to 10, which resulted in an uncompressed pdf size of 65 MB) combined, and after optimizing (under Document>Optimize Scanned PDF>set to second lowest setting for small file size) my final job was a tidy 5.8 mb total.