Obviously the distribution process wasn't perfect and I get that for people in the military in can be especially hard to keep up with stuff like this. Here's how other people in the military solved it though: During that close to one year of redemption they dropped me a pm and I handled the redemption for them. 1 pm is all it took. I think around 5 people contacted me either during their deployment or because they knew they were going to be deployed soon and couldn't participate in the normal process. I understand that even that can be too much to ask during deployment but you asked for a way to resolve it - that's what worked for other people. Obviously they had to trust me but there wasn't a whole lot they had to lose.
It's not like the people handling the distribution were totally unreasonable tyrants. It was simply a process that turned out to be imperfect. There had to be deadlines because the unclaimed stakes were supposed to go to funds that the team knew were needed for sustainable future development and investments into the project. Noone pocketed those stakes. At some point people had better things to do than handling distribution a year after this whole thing started. It sounds harsh but that's just how it was.