Sorry but this protocol seems full of big holes and I really don't see the advantage: I'm not even sure what the "needlessly strict pool boundaries" are. Would you advocate a system where there is no pool at all and everyone should look for individual partners with a local "reciprocity daemon" finding/maintaining partners and checking that everything is going on nicely? That would be a mess: with p2pool we have ~200 users (and it's arguably high variance), should I contact them all to setup the thing? What about small miners, who would bother contact them (they don't help your variance much, so why bother)?
Eliel's goal seems to be a system that automatically negotiates forming ad-hoc pools between peers. This is as opposed to the current system where miners choose to cooperate with an existing pool setup by someone else (eg, p2pool is setup and maintained by forrestv). I agree with you that this is unnecessary considering that there are already multiple options in the decentralized pool category (BitPenny, p2pool, Eligius, EclipseMC, BitArena, etc), but it is still interesting in theory and might very well be the future of pooled mining.