I also want to mention you must be sure to have a spring inside your lower radiator hose to prevent it collapsing. The thermostat is important in this application not for its temp rating, but to restrict flow of coolant. The bends you mention in your top hose will not be a problem and in fact will even help.
I have the high volume water pump like you and this actually flows coolant too fast so it doesn't have time in the engine to pick up heat and time in the radiator to dissipate it.
There are a number of counter-intuitive things going on here. Basically we just have a marginal cooling engine pumping out massive amounts of horsepower to make it even worse.
