A few threads previous, someone mentioned following through on early retirement plans as a strategy for minimizing parental contributions under FAFSA. Can anyone expound on this?

FAFSA uses both assets and income to calculate contributions.
So if the parents are retired, there is probably a much much smaller income.

My advice would be to do a FAFSA to see what the numbers wind up as. I believe you can find places online to do that for free without giving up any real identifiable information about yourself.

I have no idea how FAFSA is done for divorced parents (or for assets/income of a new spouse for the custodial parent) - you'll have to research that.