Ric will ALWAYS chase after Liz because he thinks she is his 💕SOULMATE💕. He's a sociopath, so that has little impact on his other relationships. I think that Ric was sleeping with Mobster Faith pretty much up until their first wedding (because Liz was pregnant), which why Faith pushed her down a flight of stairs.
Correction on " Sasha stepped aside and had a drunken one-night stand with Brando (Johnny Wactor) in the back seat of a car and got pregnant." Sasha & Brando weren't drunk when they hooked-up. She did go to Brando to talk soon after she and Michael came to terms about his feelings for Willow. However, when Brando admitted that he was only working for Cyrus to help bring him down, Sasha realized that the only barriers to her attraction to Brando had just dropped. They were both sober, but found auto repair erotic.
It just feels that way, but the show actually didn't accelerate their ages or education by that much. TJ was a year ahead of Molly when they met in 2012. He graduated HS in 2014 and went straight to college. He interned at the hospital occassionally while in undegrad and med school, so that might give the impression that he's been a doctor longer. However, I don't think that he became a resident until around 2021.
Because The Hamptons is where Sasha last worked in the food industry. That, and someone doesn't know Long Island and Westchester are two different locales.
My memory was that Cam & Emma were the central tween couple, while Spencer & Joss were the jealous tween schemers conspiring with each other to break Cam & Emma up. Joss had the crush on Cam, though, not so much the other way around. However, I can believe the dynamic reasonably changed after both girls left town, and only one returned SORAS'd.