I'm on my vacation at the moment, so I can only write a few lines on my mobile phone.

and then throw out your work and redo it "the right way".

I'm feeling the same way at the moment. I had developed our community finance bot (which is now active all over Steem by the way) and after additional features were requested, I realized that it wasn't so well structured. In order to better prepare the bot for new features, I needed to put the whole thing on a better feet and took an object-oriented approach.
I'm only 2/3 done, but I like it a lot better...

I'm also not sure why condenser_api/get_following seems to need the followers plugin.

I think some (maybe all?) Condenser methods fall back to the original API. This is just a guess, as I recently noticed something similar during a test with a condenser method.
Unfortunately, I can't look at this at the moment.

I noticed in your screenshot of the SCA that you are showing the edit operations and not the edited post/comment. You might want to modify that.