So three days of work and I've got the 2D version way more advanced looking than the old 3D one. This is much more what I had in mind (though of course it's all still very rough around the edges - but you know, 3 days work).
I completely scrapped the 3D version I was originally working on because it was a complete pain to work on and zero fun. So I restarted from scratch with a good-old 2D fakey 3D with old-school parallax layers. Everything here is 2D layers except for the water effect in the very front. The Regis is a stack of three layers that are offset to give the illusion of 3D. It's far from perfect but is just as much 3D as I need from the boat for what I want. I got all this done in three days where I had been continuously stalled for months with the 3D version.