Has anyone ever figured out a cure for this game's disastrous networking?

Been trying to play this with my girlfriend but it's just a complete disaster, it often takes us 10-20 minutes just to get into the game! I've never had a game, especially not one made by a major developer, have netcode so absolutely awful. We're usually playing on the same network together and both have open NAT so that's not the issue. It's at the point where we consider just giving up on playing because the netcode is so garbage