Looks like I'm back up and running now too. I wasn't able to downgrade to 9.0 because iTunes said it was no longer signed. So I did a factory reset via iTunes and setup as a new phone. At that point, iMessage and SMS forwarding started working again. I then did a restore from iTunes backup to get all my apps/settings and everything appears to be working now.
Hopefully this thread saves someone from the two days of headaches I had with this