I see...

But, and I hate to pester, that raises so many questions in my head. Wouldn't doing that mean my machines are definitely not working anywhere near what they're supposed to be? And then, if bitcoind is really THAT slow, I don't see how solo mining was ever worth it.. here's a picture of solo mining with one bfl single for ~30 minutes. This was the only device solo mining on the network at the time:
http://i.imgur.com/tRgwI.png
More than half of the work is going toward pool 2 (pool 1 is down, probably a coincidence). I mean, is it only not complaining that pool 0 is too slow because it can grab work from pool 2? Or is it designed to not put those kinds of errors when soloing? Pretty sure I've seen them before when solo, on an NB or something..

Here we have soloing now with --failover-only, ~45 minutes, everything else the same (even pool 1 is still down  ) :
http://i.imgur.com/kYkXO.png
Sorry about the disparity in uptime, but the last prompt makes me believe that bitcoind is only fast enough to provide half of what the single can handle. Temps are also the same, so it's safe to assume the single is being worked pretty closely to the last prompt as well. Everything is the same.. not sure if that matters but it seems to matter.

But if I'm misunderstanding all of this, which is fine; what is the "limit" of bitcoind in GH/s? Will solo'ing on one of those new ASIC mini-rigs basically be a no-go? I appreciate learning about this as it interests me greatly.