I'm afraid to talk about it and yet I responded every time to those concerns, heck I even created the jackpot to try to find small but in time feasible solutions. The points in low hashrate has been the subject from as long as I found out about Quark, back in June last year people were worried, now again you are worried(why I wonder as you're not involved in anything anymore), as I said in my last sentece if you bother to read I said I am concerned but thing is that, the coin pool or anyone who gathers sufficient mining power can only do as much harm as delay transactions. Of course for a big crypto currency like Bitcoin that would be devastating but for a crypto currency like Quark which doesn't handle alot of business transactions it really wouldn't matter if an army of thousands of botnets or that pool would refuse to relay the legit transactions for a few hours or days. Once quark or any crypto currency gathers more adopters you will see or have seen in other crypto currencies that the hashrate will also raise because the value will raise and so on. Thing is once Quark is a worthy currency for real use, if ever, will be strongly protected by the decentralization in mining power.

The alternative options like the contest was exactly to educate people about these sort of problems but not spread FUD because there are people even with 1-2 pages behind that think someone could steal their quarks if there's a fork or something among those lines.. so basic line is this.. that pool has a solid majority, more than 50% which is enough (not 99% like you exagerate ) its not good but its not harmful in this stage of Quark adoption because the only harm they can possibly do is delay transactions which would be unpleasant but survivable ;-)