So I guess this leaves me with one last option - Is it possible
somehow to have a parent range from which named children ranges are
created such that the children ranges would be sorted but comprised of
non- contiguous cells within the parent range- maybe somehow using
offset/match combos? For example:

The parent range could include:

A1:B10 but one child range could be

A1:B2 & A4:B6 & A9:B10 ?

Also - is there a limit to the number of named ranges you can have?
And what does this do to file size and file speed?

Is another option I could use is rather than watching for
Worksheet_Change event watching for somekind of a Cell selection event
(eg. cursor is now on cell A10) from which I could then quickly run the
validation routine on only that cell rather than keeping the entire
200x6 = and thus at any give time, I'd only need a much smaller subset
of my name range validation lists/ranges?