Logging edits to a record

To be clear, we've got 2 Pipelines running to log records in the Audit Log, 1 for when new records are created and 1 for when records are updated. Since I want to track a status field, the only way to get something like an If statement in Pipelines is to implement a condition. Each status I want to track has its own field in the parent table in this Pipelines setup, which means each field must also have its own Pipeline, totaling 7 in my case. So, one question is, what's better, a summary field or a Pipeline? Also, what happens if the record progresses normally through the statuses, but because of an error has to backtrack and go through the statuses again? Will the summary field pick up the new changes? Or keep the original data? The Pipeline updates the record, so it would show the updated data, which is I think what I would want. I guess to the point of the original post, to cover those edge cases when a record has to backtrack, is it possible to form a formula text field that just keeps adding lines to text box every time the status field changes? It would be something like:

At [date/time status field changed] the status changed from [previous status] to [current status]. The time between status changes was [duration smart field].