The novelization of Alien Covenant fixes damn near every problem I have with the film and gives me hope that most of these fixes were in deleted scenes.
I’m going to say they’re not and you have Alan Dean Foster to thank. He has a habit of trying to fix things when hired for novelizations. Saw him speak at a convention a year ago and he went on about what a huge pain it was trying to figure out a way to make Starkiller Base make any sense as depicted in the film. He did a ton of research and consulted with astrophysicists and was very pleased when LFL kept all his work in the final book and made it canon.