That's the one I used albeit it was older version even when I tried it in early 2025.

I always use the lowest "quality preset" (e.g. "slow", "VerySlow" in x264/x265). The equivalent present in SVT-AV1 will was a number value (I believe 0 = placebo in x265/x264, I went 1/2).

Unless there have been massive improvements in SVT-AV1 in the last 12 months, you most likely get much longer encode time if you go with lowest quality preset equivalent in SVT-AV1.

Maybe I am missing something? Genuinely curious as I don't have much experience with SVT-AV1 (I've done several hundreds of encodes of different levels of complexity with Xvid, x264, x265 over the past ~20 years).