I do see reasons to implement a difficulty setting in the miner
What are those reasons?
I had brought it up with Luke Jr. because I am mining at Eligius Diff 64 and I was having network problems. I'd be dropping to backup pool Diff 1 and then slowly climb to 64 with massive bandwidth usage in the meantime and then a while later I'd be back at Eligius at Diff 1 again with massive bandwidth usage while it made its way back to Diff 64 again. Back and forth with 168GH I was seeing the drawback to having to wait for the pool to figure out my Difficulty and I asked Luke Jr. if I could just set it myself.
Luke Jr. explained thats not possible with Stratum at this time. I have 10TH on order. If I had that hashrate at this time and I was dropping to and from backup pools it appears I would have a major problem and it would appear the pool would too.
Am I mistaken?