I may be completely overlooking it… but is there a straight forward way to capture accumulated time without a ton of hoops and loops to jump through?
No, you’re not overlooking anything. Perhaps there is a library in the PLCnext Store that includes this feature. Here is another suggestion from a user: https://www.plcnext-community.net/en/hn-makers-blog/620-retain-counter-for-operating-hours-for-plcnext-engineer.html