Tick delay caused by Hoppers?
Solution 1:
After reading over the wiki page on hoppers again, I discovered that the three tick cool down also applies to hoppers that receive an item regardless of whether or not it initiated the item transfer. I suppose that would put a three tick delay for each transfer except the first one(because of the item being placed into the first hopper by a command). So that makes six ticks for the hopper transfers, one tick for the command, and one tick for the comparator so that it totals out to the target eight ticks.