For anyone searching in the future I'll answer Tom's questions and list the boneheaded fix that it ended up actually being (really painful as I've been fighting this for a week).
1) According to amazon they run stock postgres as far as the query planner is concerned.
2) Yes sorry I forgot to note on our prod system the random_page_cost was 2 vs 4 on the RDS system.
3) I had run vacuum on all the tables in the query and the pg_relation_size on the tables aren't way out of wack
4) Yep both default_statistics_target was the default of 100 on both.
I was concentrating completely on the wrong direction here. What it turned out to be was the RDS configuration of postgres which we had modified somewhat I had missed configuring work_mem to something greater then their default of 1 MB. Once I brought work_mem upto the same value as our production server low and behold the query runs fast.
Sorry for wasting everyones time. Hopefully this will help someone else down the line.
