I too have noticed an increase in efficiency since using Matts "backbone" - by simply adding it to the .conf file. Is there a reason why you decided to use the jar file? I hate using anything java - it's such a resource hog.
Read a few posts back that using addnode didn't seem to work. Maybe I was misreading it and the issue was trying to add it while running instead of adding it and restarting. Maybe I'll go plop it in the conf file and see what happens.