Paul, for a first go at time-lapse photography, I'd be more than happy with that. It turned out really well, I think you're being over critical. The main complaint here would be the weather, as it probably wasn't the ideal conditions to give you the result you were hoping for. Then again, by doing this you haven't wasted a good night experimenting as a novice. With experience under your belt now you can look back at what you did right and what you did wrong and make adjustments to get a better result under better conditions. Well done.
As for shooting in RAW, why not just shoot in JPEG, no need to convert your files and if you set a JPEG resolution to match the video resolution of a single frame, the files will be much smaller, take up less disk space so you can shoot more with shorter intervals. Let's face it, full HD video is still only 1920 X 1080 pixels so depending on your sensor resolution, you may only need a medium quality JPEG to match or exceed that resolution.
The focus looks pretty good when viewing the footage on my phone but I guess when you display it on a large monitor you can see that it's not. Not having live view is a bummer but most timelapses are shot at infinity so why not just keep playing with the focus during the day, take a shot, have a look and keep adjusting and checking your shots until you get it right. Then you can refer that point on your lens with two small pieces of masking tape marked with a fine line that you align and know will be in focus at infinity. Also, a UV/IR cut filter will eliminate the cast caused by the modded camera. You can pick them up real cheap on eBay to fit your lens size and they work fine. Mind you, you'd have to do your daylight infinity focussing test with the filter in place as it will be different than without one.
Good luck and I look forward to your next and hopefully improved version
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