whenever I try to connect to anything using my public IP, my router interjects and tries to be accessed instead.
It sounds to me like you have the routers remote management
enabled and listening on port 80. Make sure it's either
disabled or change the port. This would be the only reason
you could access your router config using your WAN IP.
When remote management is disabled. the router config
is only accessible locally using the routers LAN IP.
