Thank you -ck & kano for chiming in, your experience & knowledge is greatly appreciated

I've read a lot about this subject throughout the thread, it seems to me that bitmain are actually working against p2pool, despite their claims in their pool thread that they actively support it:
We support p2pool protocol
.....and has been significantly developed during the development of Antpool.
This is simply not true. Shouldn't forum rules/admins require them to change this statement? Doing so would also save a lot of confusion for new users of p2pool who wonder why they can't get the most out of their bitmain hardware while using p2pool. They seem to be trying to transfer p2pools unique decentralised nature for their own marketing needs - despite being an obviously centralised pool.
As bitmain refuse to fix their firmware (or more likely - they're unable/don't know how to), I'd be more than willing to chip in towards a bounty for a revised & fully functional S5 firmware for p2pool - if kano/-ck would be willing? The S5's are still being sold, & will remain workable for a while yet I think, so it would certainly boost p2pools attractiveness to new users if they could simply connect & mine like any other pool. What do you think?
Tak.
I've posted quite a few times in their thread asking them to remove the references to p2pool.
Thankfully one of the mods (I believe it was -ck) changed their thread title to get rid of the bogus "supporting decentralization" claim it spouted.
Bitmain took forrest's code and added some database stuff to it. They didn't create their own implementation, or attempt to fix any of the variance problems.