snipped for focus
My interpretation is a little different. From the beginning of the grand circuit as you call it, SP is following a protocol. They come out of room 8 and turn right, check the next door down, then turn right again out of that room, and check the next one down, and so forth. And so that method has SP proceeding along the perimeter, concentrating on the outer rooms because those are the rooms to his right. He does not, in the footage we see, step across the hall to check an inner room. So he is ignoring those other auditorium entrances you mention because they’re not on the right side of the hallway.
Not until he comes out of room 10, that is. At that point he has completed the grand circuit (room 8 is just around the corner), and so he makes his first trip across the hall and breaks into storage room 9. Then we don’t see it but can assume he does the same with the next room, 14. He then turns back up the hallway and there are no other doors to open until he gets to that alcove. I think if that alcove had not been there, he would have continued on around the corner and turned his attention to Holy Grounds, followed by the next auditorium entrance.
What I Wish I Knew:
I wish I knew if police blundered in getting the last two video scenes reversed, or if it was intentional. I could see it being a blunder - if someone were given the task of editing the footage together and they didn’t know the church and were in a rush, they could have put the two Dutch door hallway scenes adjacent to one another without realizing that they weren’t chronological. And they could have mistaken the alcove auditorium entrance and the room 10 door with being the same door since it seems that way when cutting from one to the other.
On the other hand, I could see the messed up video sequence being intentional. I could see police wanting to make it unclear as to the suspect’s last known location, so they could keep that info to themselves. Which would be relevant if when Missy heard something, what she was hearing came from inside the auditorium. You could envision a scenario where she can’t locate the sound right away, walks up the hall, and then either opens an auditorium door and finds SP or else SP emerges from the auditorium behind her, and now her path back to her truck is blocked, and she is also standing in the way of SP’s path back to his vehicle on the N side. To me, this scenario makes the most sense.