So, some loose solder points and an inexplicable loss of settings on the flight controller caused me to question my code.  Result, a partial redesign of the logic which after testing actually increased the responsiveness by quite a factor.  After going through the code trying to flush out what may have been causing the quad to freak out.  I was told by several people that it must be my code messing up.  Well guess what, it wasn't my code.  BUT WAIT, I did go through redesigning of the code and it ... improved it?
OK long story short.  With the help of a classmate I realized that what I was attempting to do with the different levels of user limitations was not needed as much as I first thought.  If someone is trying to run the thing into the wall there isn't much that can be done to stop it.  So assuming the user isn't a complete moron and they are not trying to hit the wall, I removed the various levels of limitations and went for one trigger event.  Roughly 2 ft away from the wall if you are not trying to pull away, the Arduino Mega will do it for you.  This reduced the code down to around 100 ish lines of code (180 with all the comments).
What does this do?
First the ultrasonic sensors can be sped up.  The max range they will look for was reduced so less time waiting in a timed interrupt cycle.  This allowed me to reduce the time between each sensor firing by half.  The ultrasonic sensors are advertised to accurately range up to somewhere around 20 ft.  Under testing, at best I was getting some accurate readings at 12 ft and about 75% accuracy at 10 ft and beyond.  The best ranges were less than 6 ft which were about 95% or better accuracy.  So I am disregarding anything less than 70 cm (roughly 2 1/4 ft).  I will probably increase this range a bit.  Maybe disregard over 3.5 ft and adjust under 3 ft.  So the loop spends about 20% of the time it used to spend in timed ISRs but I doubled the amount that they do.  Still that's only 40% of the time it was in them before.   I could reduce the number of pings back to what we had before to speed the main loop up further if needed.  I don't think its needed though.
Also I have drastically reduced those nasty nested if else statements.  Since we only have the one trigger event now I only need to check the sensors and do something other than pass through if the event is triggered.

What does this mean.  The quad is very quick.  There is no observable response lag.

I did bring my laptop home which has the only copy of the most current code, but its late and I will try to upload it tomorrow for anyone to look at.

Future:  Possible additions to the project for after I present it to the school are in the research phase.
Breaking the code down into different chucks (e.g., ultrasonic reads and trigger,  RF PWM read in, on-board gyros for sensor leveling independent of the flight controller)  This will allow me to load the different chunks onto individual PIC chips and create a much lighter and faster embedded system.  (my goal is to make an attachment for multiple configurations of multi-rotor flight vehicles).
Additional sensors to provide a better 360 degree coverage for wall avoidance.
These possible future changes will be added to the blog if/when I do them.  but for now if anyone knows a good PIC chip I should be looking into let me know.

Well goodnight whoever may be wasting your time following my project updates.