Now, if only I could somehow take that parquet processing optimizer out of DuckDB and into a Postgres fdw reading parquet files... that would make my ETLs work great. Does anyone know of another open source project that uses an optimizer to perform queries on parquet files?

Here is a DuckDB FDW for Postgres! I have not used it, but it sounds like what you need! https://github.com/alitrack/duckdb_fdw