My coworkers have been having trouble with the web interface for exporting VM's for delivery to our customer so I looked into scripted method of export with PowerCLI. I was able to put together a PowerShell script to export a VM and the Export-VApp command has a nice progress bar to show that things are still moving forward. Alas, I discovered the way my coworker usually exports a VM through the vcenter web interface provides additional options that are not available with Export-VApp. I confirmed that the exported OVF is missing the Extra Config that we apply as a part of security hardening.
Other options I may look into are using ovftool instead. If there is a way to do this with PowerCLI I'm definitely interested.