Finished the model.
This was a huge step up from the Lupus and was pretty damn daunting when I opened up the box and saw all the pieces. It ended up being way more fun and satisfying to build, though.
To the piece that I wrote in the above post, I'd be interested in knowing if other people had similar issues with that one. There's another piece in the same that uses the same exact mechanic but this time the piece was able to twist without applying all that much pressure. I really doubt that that one was made to twist easily and the other one was so hard that I had to use pincers and more so when the manual just said to twist it after snapping another piece to it. Very odd.
I also watched the Gundam Zeta films which I gotta say, were some of the most confusing pieces of media I've ever seen. They did a pretty poor job turning those 50 episodes into 3 films. Huge character motivations just happened in the span of seconds, sometimes off screen, and I was supposed to just expect that this character now wanted to do X or Y. It's obvious that in the show all of that got explained in detail but there was no time in the movies.
The whole thing felt like they made it with the expectation that you had already seen the full anime and this was just a fun extra.