The problems I was having have been solved. The reason the experiment goes way faster is because it was using 2 or more Timers to control the rate at which stepAnimation is called. Which is weird, because a single Timer with no speed gap should be just as fast as 2 of the same. I suppose it was Thread related and could cause the performance to become unstable. It’s still weird nonetheless.
The problem with where the files were going wasn’t a problem with the files, but with my file viewer. It was stuck on view folders only and not files. Fixed anyway.
What needs to be done now is to implement the steps/episode counter in the performance.