I was also thinking about the the 5Nd thing, whether this really is just a statistical smoothing function (moving average) or wether it gives "old" miners a 5Nd (currently about 100h, but possibly not constant(

)) lead over new miners due to network difficulty changes every 14 days? Are new miners disadvantaged by this in that when their hashes are paid out the 5th time they are worth less (if a diff change has since occurred)? Maybe this has been considered before, but some explanation would be nice.
Anyone willing to chime in on whether newbies starting out are disadvantaged compared to someone who has already "filled" the 5Nd window or not due to upcoming diff increases? Thanks.
I think any perceived disadvantage of 5Nd is minimal. Right now the 5Nd is ~106 hours. It changes with hashrate +/- and difficulty. I don't think the current time span is all that much, unless difficulty is making a huge jump (>10%).
We all went through it.
I think what really hurts is the lessened hash rate that adds to the variance. And I don't think we are all that newbie friendly. Though everyone here is helpful to the max, I think a lot of times we talk over their heads. They come here for a few days don't get the quickfix payouts they got at a larger pool.