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I think you could also use a rail, just make a copy of the original spline and move it up, drop it in the rail option of the cloner. At least it works in ye olde R18.
had to reverse the transform angle in the cloner.
Deck
 

cloner_spline_orientation-RAIL.c4d

As I understand it C4D defaults to SRGB when it renders and pshop tends to default to Adobe RGB 1998, so there may be a discrepancy there just between the RGB profiles. It depends how you have your profile handling set up in pshop, ie if your pshop default is SRGB you should be fine, but the other options are to ignore the profile or to convert it to the working space, so both of these would probably change the color.
As for CMYK, thats a different ballgame and you just have to get used to the fact that some colour ranges just won't convert well to CMY and you have to make a compromise due to the limited nature of ink on paper Vs RGB on supersaturated screens.
Having said that some printing processes use more than 4 colours nowadays in which case I would give my printer the RGB and let them make the conversion.
Deck
Rendering in 16bit may help with the CMY conversion, but really depends on subject.

Your file was a bit heavy for my machine so I have had to take out a few things and also turn the petals off and the shell down to 2 clones. I also dont have field fall off in R18 so Im using a linear falloff here.
Ive copied in your original flower and put that in the cloner, I think maybe where you were going wrong is having the cloner set to "play" in the transform tab Im not great with mograph but I think when you set that to fixed you enable the plain effector to then start the animation, also in the plain effector you need to put a frame offset thats equal to or greater than the length of your original animation.
Also I deleted the turbulence from the flower as I dont think its best practice to clone that.
Stripped down file below, had to delete textures and other stuff to make it fit here.
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Frame set_06 falloff.c4d

projecting a mesh is different from projecting a spline, this may help with the spline.
 
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This is a bit of a complex file for me, but to make it work on my machine in R18, and by working I mean the balloons move up when the controller does, for that to happen I had to lower the thresholds in the deactivation tab of the dynamics, doesn't seem to need to be zero but it also seems different weather or not you play it in from frame zero. It seems when coming in from zero it has time to deactivate but when playing in from say 1250 balloons are still moving so the dynamics are still activated.
I think thats what's happening tho Im no expert on the inner workings of C4D dynamics.
Deck
Try turning both linear and angular damping to zero if in doubt, should play from zero then, at least it does on mine.
Dolly Balloons 02.c4d

This is a problem that pops up quite a lot when your clones are packed close together like that. The key to fixing it is using the movement from another cloner and transferring that to your rings with the inheritance effector.
So with the second hidden cloner you lay them out so its easy to use effectors. Normally you can just use the inheritance effector as you often want to move the clones to a new position but in this case you only want the y position, inheritance cant do that but the re effector can, so add the inheritance to the re effector list and in the re effector parameters you can turn off X and Z living only the y.
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edit, there's probably a better slicker way to do it with R25 and nodes etc.

C4D_Issue_Forum_0001.c4d

Check your "quantising" settings
Deck

if your only using one size then you may be able to have a hidden cyc that is offset by the appropriate distance and have that be the collider.
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In your sky texture you have your blue sky image in the colour channel , if you turn that off and put in the luminance channel then your bake seems to work. At least here in my R18.
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Have you tried the mograph cache tag as opposed to the dynamics, once that's in place you can turn the delay off. Not currently able to try Team render so cant say if that works but there are also some bake options on the tag that might get you over the hump.
Just a thought.
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You have 30fps on your project settings and 60 on render settings, that can play a part in dynamic sims but this rig looks a bit advanced for me to judge.
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Got it, what's confusing is that you have two things stopping your time offset, the first one is the render instance option in cloner, you need to turn that off, but you also have a second problem in your step effector where you have something in the selection field, this is also stopping it from working, change both of those and your original file works.
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Hi CBR
No real reason but I thought I noticed in the video certain shapes in a pattern, but with the extra cloner moving thru the first you get more interaction, its a bit of a balance between how fast the cloner is moving Vs the follow and this case also the gravity is at zero. Attractor is a good shout tho as it keeps it all in the middle. I did this one below with a second cloner and a different vibrate to get some more interaction, slowed it down a bit and an attractor in the middle.
As you know the variables are just endless. I can loose days tinkering with mograph.
Aligning effectors to  circular splines can be fun, with a suitable falloff you can spin the circle spline  with the effector traveling around it like a planet and it bashes into the clones every loop, so with a few effectors spinning and orbiting around you can get some quite random but kind of repeating loops.........plus a thousand other methods I guess.
Deck
 
follow position_0002.c4d

there are probably a few to achieve this, if your just looking to use a flat disc you can use the surface deformer as in file 01 below. Trouble with that is that the surface deformer squashes the geometry, that doesn't matter for a disc but if you want to do something with volume you need a work around, so in that case you could clone onto the discs that have been projected, that works except you can only clone onto poly centre or vertex etc, if you try to use axis the clones jump back to original axis, so to get around that you can use a single poly plane to clone onto wavy surface, then clone an actual object onto the centre of those polys which makes everything work, you can also use the cloner transform tools to offset from the surface etc as in file 2 below.
I only have R18 so not sure what extra tricks might be available in 23.
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Clone grid on surface 01.c4d Clone grid on surface 02.c4d

As I mentioned previously its all about the collision margin, in the grab below you can see the end of your cylinder / pivot point. Your cylinder is about 5.9 cm and the gap between the rails is about 6.2, so 1.5 mm gap on each side.
The collision margin  defaults at 1cm, the margin means that dynamics is calculated when things get that close to each other, that means with your current set up they dynamics engine sees your pieces as inside each other and that's why it goes a bit crazy. Your collision margin needs to be smaller than the space between pivot and rails.
Your cylinder is also not straight tho that's not what's causing the issue here.
Connectors are a whole separate subject, the cafes beef doctor has a great series on those, maybe this vid below will get you started, tho with collision margin reduced your rig will work.
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maybe have a look at this from digital meat.
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After thinking about it you may be able to get it done with an inheritance effector. In the file below the blue clones are just there as offstage actors, you can move them out of the way or hide them in the render. So the blues are set up in the order you want and the plain effector passes thru with linear falloff and scales them up. playing with the distance between clones ( size of plane they are cloned on ) and the speed the plain effector travels you should be able to sort the timing.
The red group are your actual performers and using an inheritance effector they inherit their scale from the blue ones and are cloned in random grid array.
Another good way to lay clones out is to have a lot of single poly planes in a connect object, you can move these about and clone on the connect object which gives you the ability to drag clones around individually. great for lining them up for the effector in this case.
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Inherit scale.c4d

You can do that with a shader effector and the cloner in sort mode.
takes a bit of fine tuning separating the colours, probably should have done it by the numbers, that will get trickier with more clones.
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Clone sort by grayscale.c4d

Can you do a "Generate UVW" command before you bend it. Right click on texture should bring it up.
 
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Less polys are generally better with cloth and square I think helps too, here's a quick example, also closer to the rail might be better. This one slips off the rail after a while so you may be better off moving it closer to the rail and belting it on. You can also use the dressomatic to step thru iterations and set it how you like. You could also cache the sim and just scrub thru to a frame you like.
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Quick cloth.c4d

This turns out to be an insurmountable problem, the Houdini site only has versions going back to 16, they said contact MAXON and after connecting with support they tell me its no longer possible, so its case closed on this one.
 
Deck

I haven't rendered your file yet but firstly you could try baking the dynamics in project settings cache and secondly I think the farme rate may need to be the same in project and render settings, you currently have 60 render and 30 project.
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Heres an alternative option. I did have a play around with the step effector but its real tricky getting the right settings, cant work out why you get a quarter left, anyway Ive left that in the file and animating the "step gap" may be an option there.
However it then occurred to me that the very simplest way to do this would be to just drop those central pieces in a cloner and then animate the clone count so they appear one by one. 
Example file below, should pay on opening otherwise press play.
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Cloner Count animate.c4d

Not sure how you displaced the cells but obviously that would be the first choice, to do similar on a plane.
I had a little look at the cloth as you mentioned it and came up with the version below. My Mac is not quite up to serious cloth so more subdivs could help, but in this example I got it close and then made it editable, and with the push brush ( pull with command down ) from the sculpt tools you can go in and clean it up / tweak it a bit.
This only took 5-10 mins. obviously not all at same level but it gets you to some sort of result.
Deck

cells_0002.c4d.zip