Let it burn

Since toad gave tacit approval (or at least apathy) here are the two main patches from Frost. Apply and watch the network wither and die, or eat crow and spend months arguing about why it works.  I used the less insane seeming values from mmaalfdks for requeststarter delay reduction... if the network burns to the ground with those values, oo's original values should be far worse.
No, the reason this works is simply a timing issue: It takes a while for requests to complete. We start more than one. We get backed off because we get a timeout. Then another request completes successfully, so we cancel the backoff.