[ozrien]

Your master and slave driving in different directions sounds like a robot-code issue.

Changing the feedback sensor will not affect the master's applied throttle unless the master is closed-looping. In which case maybe turn off the slaves until you work out a stable closed-loop response on your master before throwing more power into the equation.

The elevated current draw sounds like your master and slave are driving against each other, not a cause, just a symptom.

The status frame rates (section 20 of Talon SRX software ref manual) affect how often the signals are reported on CAN. They have nothing to do with quadrature decoding. It's not like your pressing the Self-Test button every 20ms, or print to dashboard every 20ms.

Changing the status frame rates is possible in case you want to process encoders yourself, like you would if encoders were plugged into the RIO (with a PIDContorller object or your own custom PID code).