That's strange, if you have the client and leader syncing fine on the same network, that should also indicate LAN matching is functional as well. Just a quick sanity check, but I assume both games are on the exact same version?
Do you hear a sound notification on the client when a lobby is opened on the leader?
Otherwise I'd take a peek at wireshark on the client, and confirm you see UDP packets coming from the leader on port 50200 and vice versa.
Also I doubt it matters but I have the id= field under [keychip] in my segatools.ini set among the rest of my clients. Not sure if it actually does anything w.r.t LAN matching though.
Under section [netenv] I have enable=1 and addrSuffix set uniquely per client, but since you're actually using a real environment, you probably shouldn't set those.