OK, I have ROS kinetic running now on an older 32 bit box running Ubuntu 15.10.
That improved things significantly. Now each launch of rostopic has a latency of a bit under 2 seconds from the time I press enter to when one of the servos connected to the Arduino moves. That is much better than the 4+ seconds I was seeing in the 32bit VM installation.
Now on to some more advanced tutorials and getting things set up to drive all 5 of the servos associated with the head I’m working with, then on to looking at OpenCV integration, etc.