I discovered some kind of a bug in my router where it would not let me forward a range because it kept telling me a port in the range was already involved in another forwarding rule. That port was nowhere to be found in any range or in any screen anywhere I looked on the router.

I had to use the factory defaults reset button to wipe out the router settings completely before I could get it to take a rule for that port. Not sure if it'd help you any, but if you're comfortable losing your other router settings it may be worth a shot. If you don't know the factory defauly admin password (would be in the manual) you will want to look it up while you still have internet.

The problem with this whole system in my opinion is the stability of everyones internet.  The System used a UDP transfer protocol instead of using a server.  UDP is a connectionless protocol meaning that there is no guarantee that all the data that is being processes in your game is being processed in someone elses game.  That being said the way they guarantee data is by being connected to everyone at the same time.  And the reason the game lags is that whenever one persons internet gets disrupted the whole friggin system takes a break and gets  the data to catch it up.  The more people you have in the game the higher the probability that someones internet hiccups. 

It's more UDP vs TCP than UDP vs server. Plenty of games use UDP.

OK, I was maybe excessively optimistic in my last post.  I tried a few more times and there are still always one or two people who can't connect to me.  All my ports really seem to be open, so I can't imagine what the problem is ... maybe I'll see if the proxies help at all when they're activated today.