FWIW: Mining is simply a hobby for me so not getting paid for a few days hasn't been an issue. (I have always received full payment eventually.) As long as the pool continues to pay above what I can find elsewhere, I see no reason to pull my miners. I've been mining here since last August and despite a few hiccups, delayed payments and such, I'm still way ahead of what I would have received elsewhere. (IMHO)
+1. I'm not day trading on mining and I've tried now 14 plus pools and think BAN still has the best interface. s0br does talk to people directly on irc, and i'm sure if he posted here again, certain people will jump on it. I've flagged a couple of times to him about the donation not working. His response as always is he's been building out the data, and responding to things reported here, even if he's not posting. He said the pool is being bipolar which made me laugh too!
But for Kano's stuff, every pool will have the same issue if it has a relatively fixed hashing rate (ie eligius and btcguild were always around the same) compared to a fluctuating world hash rate, and you can't use luck in the past to compare to the future. The only pools that will be able to swim against the current by maintaining their relative luck is either by getting more people mining week on week, piling on hardware (chinese pools/knc) or riding out the rough patches. This pool can hit five blocks a day if it wants to and luck is in favour, but I'd nearly give a 100% donation for a week to help go towards clearing the backlog - if it worked! I don't have much at the end of the day, but the pool's been my replacement to BTC Guild which I mined for most of 2014.