This is great, I love the detail here! I've not dug into the pressures yet, but your other observations match mine quite closely. Your hybridization of ExoPlaSim and Azelor is going to be a very nice template to follow once I get there

For your winds, the issue there might be that you're plotting one of the uppermost levels of the atmosphere. Panoply by default starts by plotting level 1 (the highest), though for our interests in climate we likely want winds closer to the surface, so maybe not level 10 but something closer to that than 1. You should be able to select the level in the "arrays" tab where you change the timestep.