No, no, your code was clean and concise, and making those changes was easy.
What I was trying to do was come up with a way to make those settings configurable, so that by passing a variable to the function, something along the lines of initCarousel('leftright'), or initCarousel('downup') , I would be able to re-use this without having to re-write it.
Again, easy enough, but that would have made the code longer again, and before you know it I might have ended up with something along the lines of your Helper Function: all good and fine, but it would have defeated my goal of having a small, clean snippet of code with a single purpose.
So rather than making this configurable, if I ever need a version of this that moves, say, left-right, or up-down, I'll just modify it as needed and use it that way.