Mining pools should actually be considered good thinking that not all miners are able to find a block on their own to get a full reward, but instead of that, in pools, one is at least assured of having a secured share for his mining work, one can at least gain what one invested into mining...
This could be mostly mitigated by moving to 3 second block intervals. Under this model you effectively turn the blockchain INTO a pool by allowing 200 times as many blocks to be produced, each with a reward of 0.5%.