For sake of conversation:  if the difficulty has jumped from 97.5 to the previously reported 344,503, the only cure is a hard fork after some code work.

I should note that the current difficulty adjustment algo is based on the Kimoto Gravity Well with the Time Warp fix, and uses the last 1024 blocks in its computation.

Per my logs:

2016-08-09 23:28:05 received block 37c2825a528f103cdc5e3fac26ce77a3588f4d572a69ad3a387f3305bee0e2ff
2016-08-09 23:28:05 Difficulty Retarget - Kimoto Gravity Well TW
2016-08-09 23:28:05 PastRateAdjustmentRatio = 1.0484
2016-08-09 23:28:05 Before: 1c02a67a 0000000002a67a00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
2016-08-09 23:28:05 After: 1c02a014 0000000002a014dbc3c543fadb829c672b0f9209df55da10db29383c0f4cf699
2016-08-09 23:28:06 Committing 1 changed transactions to coin database...
2016-08-09 23:28:06 SetBestChain: new best=37c2825a528f103cdc5e3fac26ce77a3588f4d572a69ad3a387f3305bee0e2ff  height=50895  log2_work=51.204357  tx=61080  date=2016-08-09 13:07:37 progress=0.998413
2016-08-09 23:28:06 ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED

So in theory, the next block should only be about 5% harder to find than the current block, which had a difficulty of 97.5, so the current block difficulty should be around 102.2.  Of course, that was based on a net hashrate of 845MH/s and the devs only have about 26MH/s of ASICs to throw at it.  Given that, I would have expected to find a block "On Average" in about 5 hours, not 30+ days.

Is there an exploit to KGW w/TW that yielded the previously mentioned difficulty of 344,503?  

We have been running with KGW w/TW using 1024 blocks since block 16175...  (check the source on github to verify)

Basically need suggestions and curious what the appetite for doing a hard fork is.   Please, constructive replies only...