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I concur with what your friend told you as I have problems to wrap my mind around both your English and Spanish original phrases because of the perfective aspect (something finished at the time of speaking), the perfect compound tense (something that was over prior to the time in the sentence) and the potential mood (or aspect) which refers to a hypothetical "reality" -what you expected, as opposed to what was real-. It sort of looks like oil and vinegar to me.
In your example #4 you are combining two statements: You haven't eaten yet and you have thought she would prepare something for you to eat. The second one is the cause of the first one, so, you haven't eaten yet because you have thought she would prepare some food. Then you report that as a past circumstance: You hadn't eaten yet because you thought she would have prepared some food.
In your original example there is just one statement: what you thought, which includes your notion about how the traffic would be, so there's just one temporalidad (time stamp?) so there's no place to the perfect compound tense in Spanish. If you "pensaste" something, you "no piensas" that something any more, and the thing you "pensaste" ended up being not real, but it was potential as all your expectations were that to be such way, so conditional-potential is required "pensé que a esta hora habría más tránsito" in the present, and turned into the past "había pensado (or pensaba) que a esa hora habría habido más tránsito". Remember that in the present you no longer "piensas" what you are commenting about, so it's "pensé". If you want to speak of the past, you use "pensaba", as imperfect doesn't care about the connection of those facts and the present. This is sort of a word salad, but in your example you should think of "pensé..." as "ahora no pienso más lo que pensaba antes", so your "pensé que habría habido más tráfico" means to us something like "I no longer think there would have been more traffic".
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