It did happen right after the update yes, I was thinking the same thing.

I do blame proton though, if you don't want me using the VPN, disable that, but don't ban my emails and proton pass and stuff.

Use a proxy relay, that will disable the outbox mode. A WoT relay configured for your user, filter.nostr.wine or aggr.nostr.land are good choices.

I haven't run into any issues with mullvad or iVPN since the update. Both take lightning for payment too.

Will need to try that. Thanks

Is this true though? I've not noticed increased data usage, and though there are far more relays, most of them transmit little data. Here are the top 25 data using relays, after a day of use. After this it quickly tails off into single MB and kB. In my experience uncompressed media is a far greater issue for bandwidth issue, with 2MB avatars and 400MB 3 minute videos 😂 When I made Flappy Nostrich the biggest issue was downscaling avatars to non ridiculous sizes.

I think this is an issue if you disable tor support in Amethyst. With tor enabled I see maybe 20-30 tcp sessions as I guess the rest of the relay connections happen via tor. With tor disabled I see over 1000 tcp sessions which as you say is retarded. This sort of thing is likely to get flagged by some DoS protection systems. I can see this also being an issue for users behind CGNAT where users are allocated a block of ports which may be limited. It might have actually been NAT session monitoring that flagged it with Proton as I believe their free VPN is NATed.