Great Read. Liked the Red Green nod at the end there 🍁 ;).
"Instead I kind of just test played the game over and over and got a feeling for how much time should pass until the next station appeared."
Yeah, this is one of the hardest things to figure out. While animation will always be incredibly tedious, it might've been just as equally hard to figure out, how to achieve the same effect, while also trying to queue up these transitions, through player interaction sequences.
Like, you may have had a game that could've been finished in less than 8 minutes. But it probably would've taken longer than 5 weeks to make, just trying to figure out, through planning and polishing, how each sequence would move on it's own after each player interaction - but this is definitely worth researching for future projects, so if you do plan to use this idea again down the road, you'll know how to and be able to do that very quickly.
Looking forward to more with what you're working on. I remember talking to SplashKhat and even though he mostly worked with 2D sprites in his Newgrounds shorts, he desperately wanted to move on to something that would allow him to work in 3D, because it would have offered him more control over, not only the perspective but the composition of his movies.
Stuff like Grandia, Thousand Arms and Xenogears, even though those games still utilized 2D sprites, involved a lot of 3D camera work, and often that 3D camera work, gave a better sense of emotion in a particular scene than what 2D or FMV could do alone.
2D in a 3D environment, might be the route worth exploring. Looking forward to what you work on next.