Reverse Replication skipping items

I saw this post https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1111532 and moved my save to before the reverse replicating node values were set and then obviously added another after - this didn't really help.  The next attempt i had 87 or 99 reverse replicated.

Are you getting any log messages that provide clues about why not all content is being reserved replicated?  

Not that are helpful.  I have an email service that triggers when a new submission comes in and i see that in certain cases these emails are being triggered but the *INFO* logs for creating an outbox item are not created, so to me that says that something is failing to trigger the reverse replication process.  The code is below for the reverse replication.

//Page/Node creation here session.save(); pageContainer.setProperty("hideInNav", true); pageContainer.setProperty("cq:lastModified", Calendar.getInstance()); pageContainer.setProperty("cq:lastModifiedBy", session.getUserID()); pageContainer.setProperty("cq:distribute", true); session.save();

I switched up my code to use the replication service instead.  I found this example on Stackoverflow.  Once implemented, all of my submissions were successfully reverse replicated.  Is there any reason i shouldn't be using this method?

//pageContainer.setProperty("hideInNav", true); //pageContainer.setProperty("cq:lastModified", Calendar.getInstance()); //pageContainer.setProperty("cq:lastModifiedBy", session.getUserID()); //pageContainer.setProperty("cq:distribute", true); AgentIdFilter filter = new AgentIdFilter("outbox"); ReplicationOptions opts = new ReplicationOptions(); opts.setFilter(filter); replicator.replicate(session, ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE, pageContainer.getPath(), opts);