Completely agree some more juice would be nice, but only in the sense that it would reduce variance. A key concept to grasp is that a higher pool hash rate does not have a long term impact on a given miners earnings, it simply reduces variance and smooths out a miners income. The exception is when a block is not found during a given difficulty increment, right now our luck is not great, and this may prove to be the case, however the only thing I know about luck is that it's bound to change....

TBH I loose a bunch of money running my node, however I'm an idealist and to me the bennifit of keeping the only trustless decentralized pool chugging along is the reward in itself.

I think we will see a P2Pool 2.0 soon, smart contracts will replace the share chain and allow many smaller miners to rejoin and earn rewards that don't equate to unspendable dust.

I'll predict that the days of centralized pools are numbered and that one day in the not to distant future we will see the majority of hashrate on some sort of smart contract based trustless pool.

In the mean time, for me at least, P2Pool is the only responsible choice...

I'm looking forward to spending some time making my node more useful, efficient and reliable in the coming weeks. Vacation ends Tuesday, and I'll be working exclusively on my node for at least a few days:)

/end rambling