NAS stands for 'Network Attached Storage' and there's dedicated hardware for that task from multiple brands. It's a somewhat spesific thing and from what I understand you have a multi-purpose server running on your network. For discussion it's better to use the established terminology to avoid confusion on what's what. Your generic server can of course act like a NAS, but a 100€ Synlogy NAS can't (for the most part) act as a generic server.
Similarly there's a dedicated hardware for routers and they are not the same than generic servers which can run whatever. Dedicated routers do some things way better/faster than generic server, and there's pretty much always a trade-off between the two. You can of course install hardware to your server to be as good as or even better than any consumer grade router and run a pfsense on virtual machine on top of it, but that's going to be at least more expensive than dedicated hardware.
So, your server is running pihole in a container on the same network address/hardware than the rest of your server, and I suppose you already gathered from other messages that the firewall component on it treats traffic coming from outside the server itself differently than traffic originating from the server itself. For this spesific case I'd say it's just simpler to configure the server to use DNS server as localhost:1053 than trying to work out firewall forwarding rules for it, if possible. If not, and you absolutely insist that your pihole runs on a unprivileged port and that your server also has to use pihole as DNS sever, then you need to dig out a firewall config for outgoing traffic which redirects the destination port. Or you could set up a dns proxy on the server which uses pihole as upstream and serves addresses to localhost only or one of the other multiple ways to achieve what you're after, but each of those have some kind of trade-off and there's too many to go trough in a single post.
Treat it like an elephant you want to eat. One small piece at the time. I've unlocked tear 7 right now and have zero pieces for next stage of the space elevator even planned. I've spent evenings just running around, gathering mercer spheres, somersloops and hard drives. Spent few hours here and there on ziplining on power lines and setting up radar towers across the map (while gathering spheres, somersloops and drives), accumulated few stacks of various remains and just having fun on exploring the map.
Today I had few hours to spare on my save world and ran into an issue where my power network went down. I originally planned that I'd unlock nuclear power but instead I needed to debug my fuel generation farm (where majority of my power is coming from) and I found that I missed a belt on half of the refineries so they got filled with resin and after fixing that I found out that I might have miscalculated something since not all the generators became online, but that might be just that it takes a while to fill the pipes, so that's a chore I need to take care of at some point before proceeding.
But if that doesn't feel like fun I can run around and tinker with my other factories, install smart power switches so that I can keep the power generation on and at least some production running and keep the lights on in general. And when that's been taken care of I have still a ton of map to explore, a lot more tinkering to do (turbofuel power plant would be nice) and so on.
And that's what I've been doing so far. I'm just enjoying the gameplay. End game parts are a bit of a pain to mange, but I can split all of those into manageable parts and work with them whenever I feel like it. Like having enough copper sheets to run my computer production. I started on grassy fields and ran everything I need from couple of nodes from there with mark1 miners. That didn't take me too far, but I've had my fun on upgrading the existing stuff. Tearing down all the 'old' stuff from the start and building them up better, or just upgrading the bare minimum to get to the steamed sheets or something else.
Late game stuff requires a lot, but I've just ignored it and tinkered on with what I have and I have a ton of room to improve pretty much everything. Eventually I of course move on to the late game stuff, but before that I'm just having fun on trying different build styles, figuring out efficient use of blueprints, hunting down more spheres and loops and so on.
I know some people are just speedrunning the whole thing and others who meticulously plan every step even before starting the game and run it with a spreadsheet on second monitor, but my play style is just to do whatever feels like fun at the time. Sometimes it means to jerryrig an existing factory to accept mark2/3 miners, other times it means tearing down whatever I already had and doing it better and sometimes I just enjoy the world and gather more DNA capsules.
You do whatever you find fun, it's a game after all and rushing it to the finish line, at least for me, isn't the most important thing. I have only limited number of hours I can sink to this and if it's not fun then it's not worth of my time. I stopped previous save a bit before coffeestain froze the updates and started to focus on 1.0. I was almost finished everything, but forcing myself to build a mess just to complete another stage wasn't really fun anymore and I didn't even think of the game for a half a year or so. Obviously the 1.0 release was a big part of it, but if you feel like it, just create signs or other clues to help you get back and let it sit for a while if you feel like it.