Good question. I never used the grid variation block. I guess both mean exactly the same. You can try selecting the same condition on both and check the result.
Reviewing both projects to find differences is a lot of work. Maybe you should try to divide them into smaller parts and find what they are doing differently that way.
You can program the bot to stop at a specified time and turn it on at another one via input parameters.
Are you sure you installed the custom indicator correctly on your MT4 platform?