So "trust me bro"? Not going to happen. I've worked in academics for most of my work life; having studied something means zilch for credibility or authority on a subject. Also: I assume Frontier have no clue and don't know what they are talking about? Take a looksee:
I've explained the details far too much for mere trust to be a factor - there are plenty of terms you could google in order to verify what I've said. The fact that you haven't indicates a bias you're not willing to challenge
Port Forwarding is an officially supported and suggested method of solving networking issues. It works, and if everyone implements it, you can get huge instances together without any teaming and friends list dances.
Frontier has been known to give in to a very vocal player base on several occasions - so when they start insisting, quite persistently, that port forwarding would solve things, Frontier capitulated and added it. It's an easy thing to add, and it does avoid
some issues, which initially alleviates some of the complaining. But, as I mentioned in my previous reply, if
everyone implementing it includes all of the people who have frequent network issues, then that's a lot of people with misconfigured network hardware that could end up being prioritized as a session host based on the fact that they had to implement a workaround for subpar network performance (exactly the clients that should not be hosting, ever, wouldn't you say?)
I've seen plenty of Finance Friday sessions that were absolutely plagued with purple pythons and other colorful snakes, rubberbanding, instancing issues, etc - we're so used to it that the various workarounds to anchor people into the instance are second nature, common practice, to the point that most of us are very well-practiced in dropping team and sending new team invites mid-combat, without batting an eye. And what is the most common, in fact only, piece of advice? Port forwarding. Even though it clearly isn't solving the problems/
Also, just do a quick web search of "p2p port forwarding" to get a picture of how common the usage or port forwarding to stabilize peer-to-peer networking is. And not just in gaming. Advising people to turn it off is borderline harmful.
I'm aware of how common the myth is - common usage doesn't make it correct.
Advising everyone to turn it
on has been harmful, because of the number of people who end up hosting sessions on their still misconfigured network hardware.
When I started playing, my internet service at the time was essentially wireless DSL - PPPoE over a wireless line of sight radio to a tower a mile from my house. I was lucky to get 2.5 mb down, 1 mb up, on a good day. The only time I used port forwarding back then was when I was hosting a couple dedicated servers, but those had nothing to do with Elite. And I frequently flew a full team around in my ship without losing anyone, back then.
And even though I have fiber now, I still have the same powerline adapters that I had to use back then due to weak wifi at my end of the house - they're my bottleneck now, limiting me to about 20 mbs up and down while adding a bit of latency to my ping, but I still don't need port forwarding. I do have to mitigate some buffer bloat on the powerline connection to prevent lag spikes, which are the only source of difficulty in my connection at this point (when I had ethernet running up the stairs to my computer for a month, my connection never dropped once - it just wasn't a viable permanent solution, but I'll be running proper ethernet when the opportunity presents).