Articulate Presenter Slide Duration for Slides without Audio

From the archives, I see this topic was discussed but I cannot find an answer other than inserting silent audio clips which I do not want to do to an 84 slide module. If anyone has experienced this and has a solution, thank you so much for sharing.

Details - Articulate Presenter 360

Module consists of 84 slides consisting of text boxes and graphics and animations.

Animations are set to either Appear, Fade, on-click, with or after previous animation. It all depends on the content and the screen view for the particular slide.

The slide properties are set to advance by user (not automatically, so user can control when to move forward)

The seekbar is restricted to disallow a user from advancing the course from the slide or from the TOC until they have seen the slide at least once. Then they can use the previous and next buttons.

The issue is that whenever there is an animation is powerpoint, the slide timing in Presenter has increased length when it is not needed. For example, it may only take user 10 seconds to read the screen, but the slide continues for another 10, 20 or 30 seconds until the user is allowed to move forward. Again, I want to have the seekbar restricted. 

Reducing the slide length and animation length in the Publish settings does not make a difference. I reduced both settings to .01 and it didn't reduce the forced slide length.

I do not want to insert silent audio clips as that seems unmanageable and incredibly time consuming.

I also tried changing the Transition settings in PPT but that didn't work either, unless there is a special setting it should be?

Is there a way to fix this or is it just the way the software works whenever there are animations and no audio to reign it in so to speak?

Thank you community for your feedback and advice.