Yeah, word! Would be great if ztex and grobi42 could continue their great work with btcminer!

Without stratum I have between 1-2% rejected shares.

Rejected shares are mostly duplicate shares. If pool server responds to slow BTCMiner re-submits shares. Usually a few stales occur too because by default (if submitold flag is not set) BTCMiner always submits shares which are already found.
BTCMiner will be updated from time to time as long the software is used. (ATM I'm engaged with new SDK implementations. Next BTCMiner release will not appear before February.)