How do the pools setup work? why are there 3? does it switch?
Bitmain has traditionally used a "rollover" setup on pools, so that if pool 0 is down the miner will use pool 1 and if pools 0 and 1 are both down it will use pool 2.
They normally autoswitch back to a lower pool number when it comes up, IME with the S5, but it might take several seconds to a minute to do so when it does so.
IMO those folks asking $3500 are way high on their price - I could see charging $2000 as a "available now" surcharge but IMO $3500 is a blatant eBay-level ripoff.
I just sold my L3 hash on hashnest for over 0.29 LTC / MH ... that works out to over the $3500 L3 miner at LTC prices this morning. If the market is there it isn't ripping people off. People don't have to buy and people don't have to sell for low prices.