Respectfully, if you have never heard of port forwarding before I think that you might not be very informed when it comes to XBL. Or maybe you have never heard of port forwarding because you bought a device with UPNP and therefore you never noticed the problems that can result from lack of port forwarding.
Port forwarding has been a must for quality FPS match making since the beginning. What XBL games do you play?
It really depends whether he plays a game that warns about it. The dashboard only warns about a Moderate NAT if you run a network test. Of the games I played, only Halo 3 warned about Moderate NAT. Halo 4 doesn't bother anymore.
So I don't think he's not "very informed." He's the normal player base. I don't even bother setting up NAT anymore and it works fine, even though I know I should go through the rigmarole of doing it.
Port forwarding has been a must for quality FPS match making since the beginning. What XBL games do you play?