Mining is meant to be difficult. The devs are trying to build a solid, digital commodity through work...as in computational work which gives some of Bitcoin its value. Verium possibly in the future could compete...with Bitcoin as it does solve a serious problem with scaling. Don't forget that Bitcoin was originally developed to be mined with a simple PC using a CPU until someone was able to figure out how to us a GPU and ASICs where born. Verium will be very difficult to mine this way with hit high memory requirement.

Making something difficult to obtain may give it more value and be something sought after. When paired with Vericoin we will have a true commodity/currency dynamic.

As for pool mining I'm sure someone will come up with a way to pool CPU power, cloud mining seems like a possibility.