Hi, I see the bleed off resistors and caps in your picture.
The need for a soft start to control in-rush current makes perfect sense. Would you mind sharing how you did this ? Sorry, my background is chemical engineering and I am still figuring out EE, 30 years later.
BTW, I followed the links from PMDX to look at various toroid transformers. It is amazing to me that Hammond built ones are so efficient that they are about 1/2 the mass of the Antek version. Of course, none of them are showing a lot of details, but the Hammond ones are listed transformers.