Honeywell RTH9580WF Thermostat - Waiting for Update Deep Dive

I'm still having issues with the Honeywell wifi thermostat (RTH9580WF) displaying "waiting for update" on when the wifi is routed through my proxy server, so I decided to do a deep dive into what the thermostat is doing when it's getting the weather updates.
I also wanted to better understand how to trace traffic on my network.
Here's what I learned about the thermostats weather updates system by tracing the communication between the thermostat and servers. Currently:
Thermostat requests the current weather and 12 hour forecast from a server: http://104.209.185.251. This server appears to run code managed by Honeywell in Microsoft's Azure cloud.Every 15 minutes it makes two port 80 GET requests to the IP address:http://104.209.185.251/WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/current?appKey=b9db7a3d469892e8&language=en-us&locationKey=36691_PC (return current weather for location)http://104.209.185.251//WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/forecasts/hourly/12hour?appKey=b9db7a3…
I also wanted to better understand how to trace traffic on my network.
Here's what I learned about the thermostats weather updates system by tracing the communication between the thermostat and servers. Currently:
Thermostat requests the current weather and 12 hour forecast from a server: http://104.209.185.251. This server appears to run code managed by Honeywell in Microsoft's Azure cloud.Every 15 minutes it makes two port 80 GET requests to the IP address:http://104.209.185.251/WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/current?appKey=b9db7a3d469892e8&language=en-us&locationKey=36691_PC (return current weather for location)http://104.209.185.251//WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/forecasts/hourly/12hour?appKey=b9db7a3…