difficulty must have rose like 500% after the pool came online.

block time is beginning to fix itself.
Thats a good thing, we will see far less problems that way.
Ok quick question, normally with a large pool I would want to jump in, however two things.
Ethminer has the 500ms getwork delay+aditional delay from pool &
since this coin pays out Uncles and due to network delay I am guessing that I have a chance of getting uncle credit solo mining.
With these factors, is solo (over a long enough timeline) actually better than pool by a larger factor than most bitcoin clones?
Anyone want to run some math with me on this?
Solo is ALWAYS better than Pool because you have no fees, no stales (mostly), no other traffic, you don't have to trust the admin etc..
Especially with coins like ETH/SHF/EXP and that low blocktime, you'd normally always want to solo if you have some decent amoutn of hash (3-4 GPU's). Pooled mining here is really critical on the server hardware. Of course a few things can be optimized, delay is already lower than 500, its at 150 back and forth and latency can also be optimized by using nodes in the country of the miners..
But .. As long as diff is low, block time is low -> go solo !