So, from what I played with I could only get the wait action to work with UTC times. Which is strange since the documention says it uses local time zone of the person who created the workflow to my understanding.
That being said, I was able to get it to work. It took a lot of tinkering to get it to work with the EST time I wanted end users to be able to submit from the form (while then also wanting to display EST time in an email action later too), but hey, it does work!
Essentially, my form value passes along the UTC ISO8601 values for the respective selected times. If that time means it would be the next day, I had to do checks on the time string to then have the workflow add one day to the selected date for the action. I also had to do some funky variable trimmings & concatenation to provide the times back in EST.
Appreciate the help!