The crude I solution I went with is:
- in a single folder buid vrt for each raster in the list file
- drag and drop all the
.vrt
onto QGIS
I built the vrt files with (CMD Shell):
for /f %a in (in-tiff-list.txt) do ^
(gdalbuildvrt staging-folder\%~na.vrt %a)
I'll have some more as yet unidentified legwork later to locate the home folder for each of the rasters but this solves the immediate visual need.