As well as the slowness, which I've SD checking, I notice there is a few errors in your logs relating to the EPG update. Could supply me your database to try here? You can PM me a download link from somewhere like dropbox / onedrive / googledrive. Can you also let me know your SD username? I'll ask SD to make my lineup look like yours so I can test.
After hijacking my own thread, I am back onto the 357 choppiness on pause/resume/skip issue. I did some more testing and after doing a bunch of file substitutions between 348 and 357 (very scientific lol), I can definitely state that the culprit is (at least for me) NPVRTSReader2.ax. The issue disappears when running the 348 version (taken form my 8.1 client) of NPVRTsReader2 on each of the 357 clients. For now, I am using the 348 version on the clients and I is happy .