As long as no pool has over 50% of miners, we should be OK.
One option is to bake pooling into bitcoin. A miner can either do conventional mining, but at much lower difficulty as he would today in a pool, or he can fulfill the role of a pool operator and aggregate blocks. This would require some clever tricks to make sure miners and operators dont cheat each other, but the payoff is huge.
I don't believe any such "clever tricks" exist, nor do I believe they even
can exist, and unless anybody has any suggestions, we might as well just stop this thread now.