Reading what you said, it might be good to check out the Bleach RP and potentially the OoC thread as well. Because the same things occurred there that you were talking about. I am/was part of it so I can speak from some experience to what was going on there.

Doing something as you describe going through the hours of a day or whatever, can be fine so longer as it is not a repetitive or mundane task. If it is an uninteresting task people are going to get bored of it and what to push on. And you'll have to be more objective when looking at it, because it can certainly seem like an interesting and exciting task from your point of view while others will be bored by it. That is a fine line in figuring things out as a leader of the RP.

The issue in the Bleach RP was that Xeim wanted to run a daily thing of what happens in a school type setting. Problem is that typically a daily setting in a school ends up being very mundane after the first day, but nothing new will happen and nothing interesting or exciting that ends up being meaningful to the character. You can squeeze in some amount of character development, but the same amount could be done spanning weeks or months as well. People tend not to make huge developments to their character in a single day and they tend not to do all of their quirks at once. You need the right triggers to happen to explore a different side of them.

As for the other point of our control being a little more opened. This varies quite a bit from person to person. But it is usually done for the sake of not holding up the RP for weeks at a time in a single conversation or character interaction. So we tend to give over control to the others so that conversations can be handled quickly and we can proceed through events in larger chunks. I've been in a single scene with characters for six months before because we were holding back on how much control we had. And that sort of thing can also be very taxing to people because it won't feel like progress it being made.

So we give up some freedoms for the sake of progressing the story. But that is why we have the rule that you're allowed to control people's characters up to the point that you're making decisions for them. If all it is what food they eat, no big deal (though being specifically vague is usually best), but saying that they're going with you on a trip or fighting someone. Those are actions only the person who's character is can actually make. If someone steps that far then they are exceeding their privilege and it is considered God Moding at that point.

Most of the things we do here are for the sake of progressing the story and an even and interesting pace. Which probably developed out of the problem of RPs dying off before they end. So if you move faster through it you keep people's interest longer and you get deeper in before it collapses. There is also the factor that people here even in the peak didn't post but maybe once a day per RP. So it was very easy that if you took too long in a scene it would go on for weeks or a month before something else.

Hope that answers some of it.