Hello ! Super cool to read your progress !
Interesting your point on budget and paying actors ! I think for personal project it’s ok to look for people willing to work for free.
At least, when I started working in CG I did a few VFX for free for other people’s personal project, if the project is interesting it can be also a learning experience.
But if you can manage to pay them it’s even better for sure !
Pay attention about how you’d record the voices having good sound is important even if recording in a studio is probably too expensive unless you have connections 
! And if you can try to have everyone in the same room for recording, you’ll get much more interesting interactions rather than having everyone recording their lines separately, which can work too !
And take that opportunity to record ( I don’t know the name in english) all the little screams, reactions, sounds you’ll use when people are fighting or jumping around.
Best is to play the animatic and let them record all that can be usefull as it’s playing.
Probably you already though about all that stuff but just in case …
I agree that previous attempt didn’t work really well and it’s getting better from the last two options.
It’s hard to judge like that, but instead of doing storyboards I’ll do a rough layout pass :
you put the character in the shot, you animate it ( keep it in T pose) moving from point A to B, and evaluate if the speed is OK, then you’ll see if it’s ok to make it in one shot, but sound harder to animate and not super interesting compared to making it in two. But it can become a cool cinematic shot too.
I think you shouldn’t spend too much time on storyboards, it’s really a first proof of concept and a nice playground, but even with professional storyboards / animatics it’s not uncommon to have some surprises and be forced to adapt in 3D. Being timing, relation of the character to the set, camera moves, overall proportions, impossible moves…
I tend to spend a lot of time in the layout stage, and I try to have proper lighting , FX , basically everything but animation, and it’s not uncommon for me to iterate at this stage and stop following the board. Every production is different but that’s how I like to work.
I mean, making a first storyboard pass will probably save you a lot of trouble in the long run.
But following accurately that storyboard might make you loose some time, it’s ok to retime, add shot, rework framing. Storyboard is meant to have a movie before the movie. But layout should be a even better version, it’s also possible to keep refining framing and timing in animation, basically at each stage you should revisit the previous one and change what you could.
Since going from storyboard to layout is a big jump it seems logic to me that a lot of things can move from one to the other. And obviously the closer you get to the final, the less the framing and timings are going to change.
You might want to look into tools like that : BPM - Blender Project Manager 2.0 in progress
I didn’t tested it but it’s inspired by the tools I used and that should allow you to quickly test different versions do some renders, it will bring a little pipeline to your project. At least for layout stage this can be useful.
And finally , about the set, I see what you mean, having that giant pole across the room feels weird …
This is big ben :
I kinda dig how that space is made, but maybe that doesn’t work for your story.
It might also be possible to take inspiration from that :
and get rid of the pole, if you see what I mean…
In the end, from my experience it’s always possible to make things works, but it’s hard to have things working right from the beginning.
This looks interesting to me :
This one looks cool too :
You might want to try the complete opposite direction, start to block out the space and add a few camera inside to see how your shot would play, and from there go to layout, or storyboard ( could even be painted over the 3D) and finally refine the set and do more final shots.
Sorry to not have better ideas ! Keep up the good work , it’s going to be really cool !