God, where was this when I needed it a few months ago lol
I'm real happy you uhhh had your epiphany for lack of better words xD I was facing similar problems when dealing with a script I had for the main comic I wanna write. Like, it had a calm nature to it, but man.. it really dragged on at certain points. Like 70% of what I had is dialogue-focused since I wanted to be calm for a good long while and then boom, a sudden burst of raw action.
I found myself cutting side characters, little events that happen along the way, and even shortening down the dialogue itself. I personally like being wordy and elaborating a bunch.. but I also see that it doesn't always make for fun conversations when everything's pretty straight-forward and matter-of-fact. So, I had to learn how to cut everything down to the bare minimum in spoken word. At its core, the dialogue itself was killing the pace of my story more than anything.
I'm still in the process of trying to refine everything, but man, it's such a huge improvement from before lol I'm real happy where its going same as you