Glad you figured your edit out before you got too deep. Yeah, port forwarding is a tricky beast, because there’s no “good” way to do it. Either you have open ports exposed to the internet, or you have everything bouncing off of a third-party service. Neither option is great.
Yeah, such a nightmare, lol. If I ever feel like hosting a honeypot I'll probably DMZ it or use a VPS or something, but I'm going to change gears on projects for now.