Latest version:
GIF size is about 1.7 MiB and it is made from 90 PNG’s with a file size of about 195KiB each. Only optimization I did of the GIF, to get the file size below 2MiB, was to reduce the color palette to 50 colors (which is more than I used in the .blend).
Fun fact, that I learned today is that the PNG’s as RGB, with compression set to 100% (is lossless anyway), are smaller than JPEG’s with the default settings! The JPEGs were about 280 KiB each. I don’t know if that is always the case, but for these images that is a huge difference.
I will stop working on this now for a few days and then take another look at it to see if I want to add or change something, but I am quite pleased with this result as it is now and if time was running out, I’d be more than happy to post it like this….