Unable to get iTunes match setup to complete

I recently subscribed to iTunes Match but have been unable to successfully complete the setup process. I have read many other posts regarding initial matching troublingshooting and tried the following:

-Sign in and out of iTunes Store

-Disable and re-enable iTunes Match

-Disable Genius

-Delete any songs that made it to iCloud and start over with zero songs in iCloud

-Creating new blank iTunes library and match, then import songs and match again

I've spent a week trying all of these things, and am pretty convinced the service won't work for me and will seek a refund from Apple, but thought as a last ditch attempt I'd see if anyone had any recommendations I hadn't considered before I try the Google Play cloud music service.

When I start iTunes Match it takes a few hours to gather information about my library, a few minutes on subsequent attempts, but never a few seconds.

The matching step never truly completes. It most frequently freezes at about 16,000/18,000 songs matched causing me to start everything over (including all the nonsense signing in and out, etc. noted above). Occasionally it will appear as if it finished, the progress bar complete, saying all 18,000 songs matched and begin uploading unmatched songs. I've only reached this step about three times in probably 50 attempts at iTunes Match this week. On each of those occasions, the process completely freezes during upload after 100 songs or so. I only have about 2000 songs to upload so thought by 'rinsing and repeating' I'd eventually get there, but since the entire process only makes it to the upload step about 5% of the time, instead of 20 attempts it seems like it's going to take a few hundred, which I don't have the patience for. Also important to note that even after it makes it to the final upload step and successfully uploads ~100 songs before freezing, when I start over again, it always has to re-match 2,000-3,000 songs, so Step 2 takes a couple hours before uploads begin again.

iTunes has matched those 2,000-3,000 songs in my library dozens of times now, and never remembers, I'm not adding anything new to my library. I also have received the following error a number of times, probably about 5% of the time:

We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-9838).

There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.

Appreciate any suggestions before I throw in the towel. The idea of iTunes Match is great, but as I've been searching for troubleshooting help it's become clear a LOT of people have similar problems and the quality of the service is quite poor.