After a bit more experience with publishing services, I'm seeing what appears to be inconsistencies from day to day, even using the same database and mxd. Sometimes I get a quick, clean publish, but other times I have to resort to a workaround. And it doesn't seem to be related to the number of features or the size of the service.
At this point, I suspect that my problems, anyway, are due to variations in our network speeds or changes that IT is continually making to firewalls, etc. Overall high internet traffic, or something happening on the Esri/Amazon side may be a factor sometimes, too. So frustrating when results are inconsistent.