In all honesty, SB, I think you are putting way too much thought into the lag situation.
The reason I say this is because you keep saying that you played Strikers and TF 2 and they ran smoothly and perfectly in your connection. If the issue was really the connection both games would be lag-tastic for you.
The answer to all of this is that Brawl features a terrible online system that can't handle multiple connections, even to people that are right next to each other.
I'm willing to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt and believe that people are jamming the servers with their hype. But my point still stands; if in 2 or 3 months the service is still laggy as all hell then online Brawl is officially the worst Nintendo online title in history...That is if Mario Kart Wii doesn't suffer from the same issue.