Right out the gate I want to express gratitude- over on reddit the expected response to my question would probably be something along the lines of "google it yourself" or "if you don't already know how, you shouldn't try to learn". It's nice to see that this place lives up to the label of "community" 😁
Unfortunately, wasn't able to glean anything from the logs but your port binding stuff did prompt me to try host mode networking instead of individual bindings (previously was doing the expose ports randomly option through portainer). This didn't have an immediate positive effect but it may have suggested that my issue is even dumber than originally anticipated- I think the files downloaded so far fit two categories that contribute to my low ratio: obscure stuff that nobody else wants and big freeleech stuff with so many seeds that nobody gets down to my box in the pile. This I confirmed by grabbing a high leech/low seed file from a public tracker and noting traffic on completion.
Upload still seems slow even with the public test so that may still need investigation but if I can find some stuff that people are actually downloading, I might still be able to pull my ratio out of the dumpster (hopefully before getting booted 🤞)