Well I discovered an interesting way of fixing this that works better than split DNS (because there are ports forwarded to different machines). I actually discovered this by accident too lol.
A DMZ is setup for the pfsense machine and port forwarding from external connections has worked fine from the beginning.
My brother didn't think so though as he couldn't connect to his stuff when he tested it, but he was doing it internally using the public IP, thus the redirect problem broke his connection even though it works fine externally.
He ended up forwarding the ports he needed on the actiontech and pointed them to pfsense's WAN IP thinking that ports weren't actually being forwarded (which they were externally, but not on redirect). This ended up redirecting internal connections using the public IP correctly. So thought hmm, and decided to put in a rule that forwarded all ports to pfsense WAN IP (as shown in the attachment).
surprise surprise I no longer have to rely on split dns for internal redirects!
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