Demigod Multiplayer Peer to Peer Fail

I'm seeing a lot of Demigod traffic on my site, so let me post some more about it. CD key problems now behind me, I took for granted another staple of multiplayer games: the matchmaking lobbies. To that end, the developers of Demigod believed that peer to peer is the best way to get the lowest latencies for everyone involved. What they didn't consider hard enough was that everyone becomes a client and a host in this configuration. One weekend in - and myriads of firewall and router collisions later - I'm inclined to say "what the heck". Again, I've never realized how important Battlenet was, since it was always there for us (and still is) in the Starcraft and Warcraft eras, but now I see it was an invention greater than the games themselves.

Getting a 5v5 game to start up (within 20 minutes) and running smoothly (a separate problem) is nothing short of a miracle in Demigod as of this writing. Most of the time I've seen people settle for 3v3's or 4v4's, and even those are not easy to set up. What did the beta testers do ... how come there wasn't any feedback on how horrible this system is ... I don't understand this at all. I like the game and the online competition is pretty tough, but so far, this launch has been horrible and its current online state detracts a lot from the total experience.