In a way, seeds are peers except seeds have the full copy of whatever you're downloading.

As for your BitTornado, you'll probably want to double-check your port forwarding config. Apparently, it's not very happy with it.

As for your speeds, fixing the routing issue may alleviate the upload speed, but probably won't (especially if you have a really fast connection). You're at the mercy of all the other folk's speeds. (Of course, you can throttle)