Of course there are situations where banding is hard to fight. 8bit is somewhat limitated, but on the other side, nearly all playback devices will reduce to 8bit, no matter what you do. Try the noise reduction/addition approach and otherwise I think, don't be too strict... We filmmakers tend to see things that the normal audience wouldn't even notice. :-)

I thought it was strange that LRT was creating output with banding, when there was no banding in my original sub frames. I was sure that my 8 bit TIF export from Lightroom should have been processed without banding, but not sure how to get that result. Finally, I was able to do it. And it was a minor little thing! To get a nice smooth sky with no banding all I had to do was select Ultra High Quality output in LRT. I was using the default "High". Once I changed the quality, problem solved. A word of caution, I doubled the file size but I am indifferent to files size in my case. All I wanted was no banding, and I got it. So LRT CAN do it all Sometimes you just have to try everything. The only problem is my sequences take such a long time to export and render, that I had hoped to avoid multiple iterations of making mistakes like that. oh well, its all good now. Thanks Gunther for your feedback.

In my first reply I said that increasing the encoder bandwith is of course one way to go to fight banding, of course I was expecting you to have done that by increasing the render quality settings.

you planted the seed, i got there eventually.