I used the drill press to drill some test holes in my test piece of aluminum. It was remarkably quiet, I literally could not hear when the cut started, I only heard the sound of the drill (and the drill itself isn't loud at all). Good news is that I have the option of doing the holes at night if need be.

I did one hole with and one without cutting fluid. Given how smooth the cuts are, I literally could not tell a difference. The cutting fluid makes cleanup more annoying, as it all turns into a gooey mess that the aluminum chips stick into. In theory, the fluid will make the drill bit last longer, but that's difficult to meaningfully measure without doing hundreds of cuts. Also, the drill bits were like $1-$3 each, so as long as I'm not going through multiple a day, I doubt they will be more expensive than the cutting fluid. I am currently leaning toward NOT using cutting fluid on the drill press, mostly for cleanup reasons. At the stage I'm working at, where there's a lot of manual labor, labor costs tend to be the most important. Cleaning up the cutting fluid is going to bog me down. I reserve the right to change my mind once drill bits start getting dull and I see what that life is like.

For the saw cuts, I haven't done a test on that yet. Life has gotten in the way during the daytime, and I'm 99% certain it'll be too loud to do at night. I expect that it will need cutting fluid for those cuts, but maybe I'll be surprised. I will have pictures of the various test cuts shortly.

Edit: One thing I definitely learned is that I will absolutely need to debur the drill cuts. (Almost definitely the saw cuts as well, but I'll get to that determination once I've done the test cuts.) That's another step on the process I had forgotten about before.