Notice the "worst" column for vulture/choopa
what does this have to do with OpenWrt?
What do many of the forum topics have to do with OpenWRT? It's router firmware but people choose server platforms, media sharing, etc. These are not store and forward topics.
packet loss or high (worst case) RTTs restricted to specific hops along a path have very litte bearing on that paths performance for the data transfer between the endpoints, though...
If the endpoints RTT and loss is good, like in your example, than you can safely ignore the intermediate hop's response profiles, these often are routers that are optimized for traffic routing and will generate ICMP/UDP/TCP based response packets only with low priority and often even rate-limited (routing is often done in the beefy specialized ASIC hardware, while responses often are generated by the comparatively puny general purpose CPU of the router).
A typical path problem in a traceroute/MTR result would be increased packet loss and/or RTTs only from a specific hop on until and including the endpoint, but see https://archive.nanog.org/sites/default/files/10_Roisman_Traceroute.pdf for the challenges of interpreting traceroute results....
Considering my location to Atlanta is about 50ms or less, and notice there is an average rise in rtt of 25ms on top of that, It doesn't look promising.
The third hop seems to be New Orleans.Just because you are physically close to Atlanta, unfortunately, does not mean that your packets are routed, "as the crow flies". The sad reality is that routing more or less follows the path of lowest cost to the ISP and not the shortest/fastest. In fact the term hot pitatoe routing describes the policy to hand over packets to somebody else's network as quick as possible as that helps to keep one's own network uncontested, it does not really guarantee shortest delivery between the endpoints though ...
You're 100% correct, but I should have clear to mention between hops 10 to 11.