I think the vanityminer idea is a pretty cool idea.  The prices are so low, I'm not even close to making a profit, but I'm in experimental mode.  For new people like jaywaka2713, they don't really know whether or when miners will get to their work.

I would suggest a sort of bid/ask criteria.  (I privately mentioned something like this to ThePiachu, but he said he doesn't have time.)

One idea is to have miners work on posted requests, but allow the miner to put a price on their work.  "I've solved your hash, but I'd like to receive X.XX BTC for my work."  As with any other market, when bid and ask meet, the transaction takes place.  Here, however, the market is quite thin.  There may be multiple sellers of the solved hash, but there is only one possible buyer.

Maybe a better idea would be for miners to advertize their rate.  Something like "I'm only working on hashes valued at over 8000 satoshis per gigakey".

Customers also need a better idea of the difficulty of their pattern and the value they are offering to miners.

Did you know that a vanity address that starts with an upper case R-Z or a lower case letter is about 58 times harder than a vanity address of the same length that starts with a digit or an upper case A-P?  So, "1Stryker" or "17Stryker" would take about 2 months on my hardware, while "15tryker" would take about a day.

Just some ideas.