However, for me to use what little influence I have right now can someone maybe give me an higher level overview of how a ckpool works vs say a larger pool like antpool. I read the thread on ckpool last night and it was a bit over my head. I am trying to learn more of the of the inter workings.
Welcome.
The ckpool thread itself is about the software behind how kano.is and solo.ckpool.org work and not something regular miners are expected to understand.
There really is nothing different fundamentally about how antpool and kano.is work, as ultimately they're both PPLNS stratum mining pools for bitcoin.
The main difference is that we wrote the software we use ourselves from the ground up to be ultra-scalable and efficient to minimise any chance of lost work and orphan blocks. Because of the design of the software, we're also able to include more transactions than any other pool without it affecting our performance - and that means more transaction fees on average for every block solved, and transaction fees are included in miner's rewards. Additionally, unlike every one of the larger 3 pools, we do not do SPV mining meaning we always validate all blocks before working on new blocks - which mean there is zero chance of us working on a broken fork of the blockchain (which the larger pools were guilty of doing last year). Whatever fees that may seem to be lesser on other pools, and whatever alleged extra rewards they get from merged mining shitcoins are greatly offset by the losses incurred by the software design/set up/policy/maintenance of the rest of the pool design.
Payouts here come when blocks mature (101 confirmations) and the entire block reward is completely distributed on each block solve meaning the pool never behaves like a "bank", storing miners' bitcoins - and the associated risk that come with behaving like a bank are abolished. In the future we may be doing payouts once a day to consolidate payouts but that will only happen if we become large enough that blocks are more frequent than they currently are. We also guarantee that should we ever get very large, we will create disincentives to take more miners to prevent our size from ever being a risk to bitcoin's decentralisation - 10% is our cut off. Kano also provides personalised support on this forum instead of no support or facebook messages. Kano being the main pool admin means you have someone who sets alarms to literally wake him up 24/7 should there be any issues to work on them as soon as possible. Finally, Kano and I are the software developers responsible for cgminer which in some form or other powers more than 90% of the network, and we continue to develop mining and pool software and contribute it all back to the community.