Oh definitely, I know it ends up even in the "end". I prefer the lower variance for sure, and hindsight is always 20/20! I had no way of knowing if I'd hit a block in 5 days as I did, or 25.. So it was definitely worth having the steady flow coming in to know everything's working nicely.
Take solace in the fact that if you were solo mining you almost certainly would NOT have solved that block since you would have been working on [all of] it in differently.
The odds of finding a block solo and finding a block in a pool are exactly the same.