One of Eligius's advantages is that you can create separate little stashes of 'virgin' coins. I would have thought this an appealing point of differentiation for Eligius against other pools.
If you have to mine to a single address and then transfer coins on the blockchain - you tie these stashes together in the public record.
It wouldn't bother me if payout to inactive addresses was low precedence and slow.. but it should be automatic and complete.
I agree with this and I think a happy compromise could be:
EC is paid out to current miners first and if there's still remaining credit, then EC is paid off.
There are times where a miner might have to stop mining for legitimate reasons (say winding down from mining for good) and if this happens to happen during a time of poor pool luck, they get screwed. There needs to be a mechanism that those people get caught up, even if its the lowest priority.