Thanks for hosting the server, great fun and hilarious conversations to boot. Hopefully I'll make your next organized battle, haven't given those a try yet but they look enormously fun.
If you decide to go with the cheatmenu option, you should know that there is no known way to turn it off, at least no one on these forums has reported figuring it out. It will reveal all sorts of debug information that spams you during gameplay.
Yeah, after boosting my renown up to 4-5k just repeatedly doing feasts, I've noticed it seems to be slowly dropping. I also no longer seem to gain renown from battles/tournaments.
Happened to me as well, even though none of my companions left due to low morale. However, after several weeks the problem corrected itself and I was able to dispatch companions on "right to rule" quests again.
Try playing with your video settings by selectively turning down options. For some reason turning off "load textures on demand" in the start up menu seemed to remove some of the lag for me. Not sure if it will work for any of you though.