I wonder where you'd be had bigjx and I not merged projects with the present one six years ago.
My understanding is bigjx tends to go through particularly busy periods at work and thus might be slow to respond at times.

I know one reason, a redundancy in the code approach. My own custom version is particularly fast to connect (as good as 2009) and reliable with no major drops during a session, a particular problem I had been witnessing over a few years regardless of program version.

Out of curiosity do you ever connect as an ultrapeer? Do you port forward or use UPnP?

After being away in the heavily fire affected region of my state for a month, upon returning found my programs were all firewalled and took me some time to figure it out. My partner's ipad had stolen my static network address. (My video card had died upon returning before eventually getting things back up.)