I stayed away from rentals for months while occasionally mentioning the withholding risk, but I never saw any evidence of it happening.  Despite the amount of rental activity this pool was getting, our long term averages just didn't show an issue.  The math made/makes the risk from rental withholding low (e.g. if 10% of the pool were rentals and 10% of the rental service was bad hash, then the impact on the pool would be 1% -- I'm talking typical rental activity here, not the block busting bursts).  With no evidence of withholding actually happening, the 1% risk wasn't too bad.  So, I gave (and still am) rentals a shot.  At the best point I was up over 1BTC.  The bad luck came and I kept renting steady through the bad luck.  I lost 2BTC and found myself down 1BTC.  Now, just as I'm beginning to recover (maybe) with an upturn in luck, is when a campaign starts to ban rentals from the pool...

Don't get me wrong, if rentals are provably causing the pool harm then something should be done about them (myself included), but let's wait until Kano looks through the data before jumping to (and acting on) conclusions. 

Regardless, a lot of the rental problem may go away on its own on 6/1 anyway.  NH is switching to PH units but keeping the 0.0001 scale (so, to decrease what is now a single step from 0.0026 to 0.0025 will require going 2.6000, 2.5999, 2.5998, etc. one step at a time with minutes of delay between each tiny step).  That is probably going to make it impossible to get the rental price back down to anything decent whenever the mysterious highly overpriced infinity hash rate orders flash up for an hour and go away.  Anyone who runs a bot to maintain a steady N avg (like myself) is going to find this a nuisance-- possibly enough to give up.