Wow, already been over a year since I made this comment, lol. But I discovered what the underlying issue was: While the Mac Mini that I'm working on is, as I've said, a beast of a system, the one thing it doesn't have is a decent graphics card -- it seems to use only about 1536mb for graphics, and it's basically stuck with that. This never struck me as an issue until I started thinking about what kind of minimum system setup would be required for players to run my game, and I noticed that the RPG MAKER engine itself typically needs at least 1gb of VRAM... So I'd already been developing in it for several years using just a fraction of the power that was recommended for it, lol. I just recently got into working with After Effects, and got an old Sonnet Breakaway Puck RX570 eGPU to speed things up... When that 4gb is running, your animation flows smoothly and without a hitch! My guess is that it would work equally well with just 1gb, so my issue was pretty much a non-issue.