I like your pictures...and Einstein and Robeson and old man river. These are very good metaphors, but filling space with aether is really not the way out of the GR conundrum.
Although my aethertime theory also supposes a fundamental aether particle, it is necessary to set aside the notions of space and time as absolute. Instead, space and time simply emerge from the action of aether and so both matter and action have a phase as well as amplitude.
In a sense, cellular automata is the same as aether just as you argue. However, it is necessary for the CA to have phase as well as amplitude and so as long as you use qubits and not just bits, quantum CA will represent reality. Of course, a quantum CA will allow superposition and entanglement and so that approach will not be determinate.
Most CA models introduce noise as the chaos of large numbers of classical particles and actions. This chaos works well for gravity since gravity is biphotonic and therefore does not show superposition or interference under normal conditions. However, CA chaos does not represent quantum superposition or entanglement and CA needs qubits to show how matter bonds to other matter with phase coherence.
Instead of showing how a CA array transmits angular momentum, start with action as an axiom and from the action of a finite CA set, space and time emerge. In essence, is is from action that the order of space and time emerge and space and time do not exist as a place for action to occur.
Gravity bonds do not show phase coherence but charge bonds do. The CA with qubits is then just a different version of our quantum reality. As soon as the model fills space and time with qubits, the model inherits the same pathologies as the current spacetime paradigm.
If you model allows space and time to emerge from qubit action, it should end up the same as aethertime.