Do the verbs in past perfect express direct causes

By the time I was in line to get in, I was already extra annoyed: the venue had sent out an email a few days before, inviting anyone who had purchased tickets to the show to bring a friend for free. Sure, I made the magazine pay for my ticket, but I then subsidized my boyfriend's ticket in a successful effort to pressure him into coming with me to avoid being trapped in the horror story "woman standing alone at 2026 Black flag show."

I think "made" and "subsidized" are perfect in the simple past because they are not the direct cause of the annoyance, whereas "had sent out" and "had purchased" are directly related to what caused the annoyance, so the past perfect is justified.
What do you think of my reasoning?
I found this article in a fanzine, I know it is too much well written but…

There is a shift in time perspective. The paragraph begins at the time when "I was in line to get in" The next couple of sentences are in past perfect as they describe states at that time in the past resulting from past events.

At the middle of the paragraph, the time changes. The writer begins a narrative about how she got her boyfriend to come with her to the show.

Now the textbooks say that if you start a new time perspective you should start a new paragraph. But this author has not, probably because the narrative in the second half of the paragraph is directly relevant to explain the first half.

It is quite common for writers to shift from past perfect to a simple past narrative after a couple of sentences. It avoids having the whole paragraph in the past perfect. Perhaps the author could have restructured the paragraph in some way, and while this author is no Hemmingway, there is nothing too strange about this kind of shift of time perspective.