Trying to Handle My Issues with POV, Pacing, and My Screenwriting Habits

I've been working over the past few days on my novel Sojourners and feel like I'm making some progress, but I'm not sure if I'm ultimately going the way I need it to. If you read my earlier posts, you know that I'm struggling with the point of view (POV) of my story. Essentially, though I have no problem reading 3rd person POV (the God perspective), I have a tough time keeping engaged when I write in 3rd person. It's tough for me to maintain interest where I'm treating characters like puppets, moving the from place to place.

But I'm in the middle of an exercise where I'm doing a mix of 1st- and 3rd-person POVs.

Let me explain a little bit about my bizarre-o story structure:

1. I'm starting off with my main character Michael, having been captured by pro-Earth forces, but is comatose, critically wounded, and is being taken back to Earth. Since they don't know whether he'll survive to make it back to Earth, Lt. Chin, an Intel officer, used nanobots to connect to his brain and create a simulated environment so she can interact with him. During this time, the 1st person POV is that of Lt. Chin.

2. Once she starts interacting with him, they find the memories they want to "replay" and then it becomes a 3rd-person POV where they are both re-experiencing his memories from his limited 3rd-person POV.

So, here's my dilemma. As I read through this, I wonder - am I nuts? Are these some serious and unnecessary convolutions that could just be avoided by jumping straight to #2 (3rd-person POV?) Or is this a good way of scaffolding the story.

Here is where I'm torn:

Jump Straight into the Story vs. Set a Good Hook: As you know, readers are not patient people. Most people give a story maybe 10 pages, so not a lot of time to hook people in, so jumping straight in seems like a no-brainer. However, readers also need to know the stakes so they have a reason to care about the character, as well as knowing the main characters "ordinary world" (see Vogler's The Writer's Journey). It's at least an issue of pacing.

Levels of Description: The advantage of a 3rd-person POV is that you have the opportunity to provide a deeper level of description (see Buckham's books on Active Settings), since most people don't talk about the backgrounds when they're telling you a story (esp. epistolary 1st POV). It makes the 1st person POV dialogue-heavy, almost like a screenplay. For me, coming from that background, I'm very comfortable with that, but maybe it's now more of a hindrance than a help, but I like how it reveals character and speeds up pacing.

Maybe the crux of my dilemma is my hanging on to bad screenwriter-based practices where I need to let it go and commit fully to novel-writing and assume that requires 3rd-person POV to tell well, though other novels have pulled it off. *Sigh*

I'd welcome and feedback on this one. I'll also address this with my writers group, but our next meeting is several weeks away. I'm also procrastinating on my edits, probably using this exercise as my excuse. It's amazing the games we wannabee authors play in our heads, isn't it?