New to this pool and new to ltc. I am very interested in pushing my btc hardware to mine entirely for ltc as ASIC's move in.
Welcome!
What is the estimated establish time for Stratum on this pool?
No ETA at the moment. I'm working on it in my "spare" time.

What can be done to lower the stale rate until Stratum is setup?
We're working on rolling out some new hardware. I expect that tonight (in about 2-3 hours) I'll be taking the site down and moving things around. I'll do my best to minimize impact to the miners, but there will definitely be brief interruptions.
Cheers.