Keeping your observation above in mind, I re-installed 20.10 beta using the iso from Sunday on Sunday afternoon.
I used the "something else" method and chose an old fat16 Dell Recovery partition left over from an ancient windows install that came with the laptop to install the EFI boot loader. From there, everything went well and the new system booted with everything working as expected.
Thank you Norbert_X, for all you do! After a power outage Monday (due to fire season here in California) I spent part of this morning, installing and configuring various things in 20.10. Grub works on my legacy system.