The solution is to not only leech but to also seed (open your port).
addnode entries in the conf file don't result in my win clients connecting to my daemon. My daemon STILL has only 7 connections. I'd stand up more daemons with open ports on other vps boxes but I just don't trust what is occurring. I'm halting this daemon.
I'm a nub or whatever, but this launch has me questioning things I've had the luxury of not questioning for any other launch.