My two cents on this matter. Not attempting to convince anyone. Only a Personal experience.
Back in early 1979, I actually designed and built one, very similar to your requirements.
A Disco owner wanted a light chaser.
I had to define a state diagram, obtain the minterm expressions, and then reduce them using Karnaugh maps or Boolean reduction techniques. Translate all of this into a schematic utilizing real 74xx or 40xx gates and flip flops, and finally build it.
It was a lot of work. Are you familiar with those Boolean techniques?
When the Disco owner suggested a “simple update” to the light sequence, I had to recalculate all the previous steps, and then realized that this simple change required a complete and thorough hardware update.
That was when I realized that I should better implement it with a microprocessor.
Even though back then the primitive tools and low-horsepower microprocessors meant that I had to code using assembly language, and had to enter the individual opcodes via an hexadecimal keypad, in the end that was the better approach.