This sounds like a good strategy. I understand the desire to engineer the ultimate-in-fairness payout algorithm, but at some point it becomes too difficult for miners to figure out what 1 BTC of EC is worth (0.99BTC in my wallet? 0.97BTC? 0.0BTC if the pool goes away?) and that uncertainty itself is a cost. Ensuring that any uncertainty is resolved after at most Dx8 shares is a big positive.
The elimination of this database means the current Artefact2 stats will not work with this new pool unless someone steps up to update it.
That is a real bummer. The Eligius statistics graphs are an awesome, awesome tool for debugging miner software, especially performance problems that appear and disappear intermittently. I really hope the graphs stay.