Busy Schedules
Just throwing some random ideas in.

I used to play games like Ultima7 and now I play Oblivion and an interesting thing i like about those two games is that NPCs literally wake up in the morning, have breakfast, go to their shop, open it up and do their business, take a break for lunch, close shop in the evening and then go to bed at night, (at which time it would be easy to break in their shop and steal stuff).

When using cheats in Ultima it was possible to see the schedules for the NPCS.

08:00 wake up
09:00 go to work
...
12:00 eat lunch
...
19:00 go home
20:00 eat dinner
21:00 sleep

I pictured if in Sindome some NPCs would close shop and head down to Drone for drinks in the evening then disperse to ther homes and leave shops guarded by autocannons or dogs or something.

Anyways, just a thought.

Small hack _might_ solve this.

Divide the 24 hour schedule into 4 identical 6 hour schedules

0:00 go to work
0:30 work
1:00
1:30
2:00
2:30
..
5:30 go to drone
6:00 random("get drunk", "eat", "talk to bartender", "use NLM term)
6:30

Or another trick is to have shop owners change names, so while one of them is sleeping, the other one is working, but still have the shops close down for a brief period of time.

As for pupetting the NPCs on schedule, it could print a simple reminder on screen saying.  [Time to "go to work"] or something.