Indeed, animation render settings are something to themselves and require some learning and experimentation beyond what is necessary for stills. But once you have a good sense of what works well the iteration can get faster for future scenes.
The ideal minimum number of samples will depend on what kind of elements you have in your scene. If you have objects with lots of fine details, for example grass, evergreen trees, or a house with railings as a non-plant example (or fencing, etc.), then you probably don't want to go below 1/16 first samples, and likely need a minimum of 4-6 samples per pixel to get decent results. If you have less "thin"/detailed objects and/or mostly atmosphere, you can potentially have less samples per pixel, maybe as low as 2, but really the best approach is to do lots of tests with your actual scenes.
Microvertex Jittering is not necessarily going to give you visible noise/jittering. I would generally trust what the Check Animation button changes. This includes disabling Detail Jittering but *not* Microvertex Jittering. That being said you probably won't see issues in your scene from not having microvertex jitter enabled, I don't think.
Detail Blending increases render time, so you could try it at 0.5 (again this is what the animation check button sets it to). If you see an increase in popping artifacts then you may need to increase it.
I also forgot to respond about the Ray Detail Multiplier, but the default is 0.25 and you should probably just use that value. Increasing it is most often useful in situations with water or other refractive materials, for rendering of higher detail refracted surfaces.
- Oshyan